First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

by Richard Preston

  “I twisted Westphal’s arm,” Gunn would admit. Gunn believed that only Jim Westphal, who had been torquing bureaucracies for most of his life, could successfully build the camera. Gunn feared megascience. He had been secretly terrified that Westphal or somebody at NASA might nominate him, Jim Gunn, to drag the Space Telescope kicking and screaming into the new world. “When I told Westphal that he had to lead the project,” Gunn said, “I was merely trying to protect my tail.” The team, which eventually grew to twelve astronomers, began to meet regularly, throwing around ideas for how to build a CCD camera for the Space Telescope. They decided to call it the Wide Field/Planetary Camera, or the Wiffpick for short (the word comes from the acronym WF/PC). The Wiffpick would contain a reflective pyramid that would break up a shaft of starlight coming from the telescope’s main mirror and bounce it into an array of CCD cameras. It would operate in two modes: a wide-field mode, for making images of faint galaxies, and a planetary mode, a telephoto action for zooming in on planets. (It is interesting to note that Gunn’s first good amateur telescope, the one he built in high school, featured a Wide Field and Planetary Camera—as Gunn called it even then.) According to Westphal, “In a technical and a scientific sense, Jim Gunn is the brain behind the Wiffpick.”

  “Absolutely not,” Gunn said. “Westphal is the brain.”

  In any case, the Wiffpick team saw that it would not be easy to convince NASA that the Space Telescope needed a Wiffpick. One way would be to build a prototype CCD camera, to demonstrate that the idea would work. So Westphal went to a restaurant supply store down the street from Caltech and bought a spaghetti pot for eight dollars. He built a CCD camera inside the spaghetti pot. He took the pot up to the Hale Telescope and fastened it to the Hale with a handful of bolts and a lash-up of Palomar Glue. He let first light into the spaghetti pot. Describing what happened next, Westphal said, “There is just nothing like taking a five-minute exposure and seeing deeper into the universe than anybody ever has before.” In the summer of 1977, his team submitted a design for a Wiffpick to NASA. Competing against two other designs, the Wiffpick won.

  Jim Westphal has a white beard and a crew cut. His team sometimes refers to him as Captain Fuzzy, although never to his face. His hands, I have noticed, are usually into something. One day I found Westphal in a lab underneath Caltech with his hands inside an antique (circa 1975) computer tape drive. Anybody but Westphal would have thrown it out years ago. “Not having the tape on the capstan will get you every time,” he said as a loop of tape spat out of the drive and circulated around Westphal’s hands. “It was a brave act for NASA to select us,” he said. “See, legally, I’m an amateur astronomer.” He still does not have a Ph.D.—no paper credential other than his bachelor’s degree from Tulsa. The Wiffpick was assembled by aerospace engineers in pressurized clean rooms at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working under contract with NASA, and neither Jim Westphal nor Jim Gunn touched the camera with a soldering iron.

  Nobody at NASA wanted any roaming, septic gadgeteers rooting hog inside the Wide Field/Planetary Camera, even if those gadgeteers had dreamed up the camera in the first place. According to Westphal, NASA has traditionally discouraged the Principal Investigator of a space experiment from trying to engineer the spacecraft. “You don’t let people like Jim and I build flight hardware,” Westphal said. “It might vibrate apart on launch.” The Principal Investigator is supposed to plan the scientific experiments, but trained engineers, hired by NASA, are supposed to build hardware that will not vibrate apart on launch. In effect, the engineers told Westphal and his crew to give them the basic idea for the camera and let them worry about the details. One does not tell a gadgeteer not to worry about details.

  At one point Westphal hired an optician named Art Vaughan to do a preliminary design of the mirrors and lenses that would go inside the Wiffpick. Vaughan sat down at his kitchen table with a pocket calculator and invented all of the glass for the Wiffpick. He gave his plans to Westphal, along with a bill for a couple of weekends’ worth of work. Westphal sent the plans over to the Jet Propulsion Lab, and then the trouble started. The engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab took one look at those drawings, panicked, and sent them to a major corporation for evaluation. The major corporation sent back a bill in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars and an answer that Westphal characterizes as, “Yeah, it’ll work great.” Westphal blew up. “I went absolutely nonlinear,” he said. The resulting uproar caused the aerospace people to nickname the Wiffpick team the Woof Pack, apparently because the Woof Pack had snarled at them and slobbered all over them and bit their ankles.

  “Those guys wanted to take a picture of the beginning of the universe,” one engineer complained.

  “It has not been a real smooth interaction,” Westphal put it.

  “Those Calteckers can be a pain in the ass.”

  “Catastrophic differences in philosophy.”

  “We aerospace types need those people in left field or we’d go rolling downhill. But would I try to fly something Gunn or Westphal had built? Sure. I would take it up in the space shuttle and launch it at the sun.”

  As a part of his blood pact with NASA, Westphal demanded the right to review and authorize any large requests for money by the engineers. “I followed the Golden Rule,” Westphal said. “Those what’s got the gold makes the rules.” Westphal got his hands on the gold—he signed for every major expense. “I could turn the money on and off,” he said. “I could stand up in places where I shouldn’t stand up and say, ‘This is a bunch of crap.’ ”

  NASA officials were generally delighted with Westphal—he showed awesome engineering and scientific capabilities, and he saved plenty of taxpayer dollars—but one day Westphal went too far. He stood up at a big NASA meeting, and in front of a large number of officials he fingered a fine point of the Space Telescope’s design as unworkable crap. An outraged NASA official telephoned Marvin (“Murph”) Goldberger, the president of Caltech. The NASA man told Goldberger that NASA was having trouble with a loose cannon. He said to Goldberger, “We want to get Westphal under control. We want him fixed. Tell us how to fix him.” Murph Goldberger allegedly replied, “I would like to know that myself. If you ever figure out how to control Jim Westphal, please let me know right away.”

  One of the key figures in the development of CCDs for astronomy is James Janesick, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab. He is known as one of the Jims—the other two being Gunn and Westphal. Jim Janesick, a handsome, lanky person with a self-deprecating manner, had dropped out of high school in the sixties to play lead guitar for a band called the Tangents. The Tangents developed a sound similar to the Rascals. They cut a few singles and made some television appearances. For a short while the Tangents were more popular than the Rascals. Their single “Good Times” brought them onto the charts in Detroit. It looked as though the Tangents were about to take off—and then the Rascals took off. (“They were better musicians,” Janesick thought.) Janesick eventually wound up working as a technician for the Navy. One day he saw a classified ad in a newspaper, saying that the Jet Propulsion Lab was looking for an expert in CCD cameras. “I didn’t know what a CCD was,” Janesick recalled, “but the ad said that they were an equal-opportunity employer.” He got the job, whereupon he became entranced with a silicon crystal that could seize a few stray photons that had come from a galaxy far away and long ago. He performed experiments on CCDs—flashed ultraviolet light on them, vaporized gold and platinum on them—and thus discovered ways to make them more sensitive to light. Nobody fully understands how a CCD works, even though it is possible to build one. Janesick said, “Trying to understand what Mother Nature is doing inside the chip is like peeling an onion. Nature allows you to go as deep into the chip as you want, and you will always be entertained.” Janesick set about building a signal processor—an elaborate amplifier—that would pluck individual electrons from a CCD and turn them into a crisp image of a galaxy. Janesick thought he knew something about amplifiers.

>   So did Jim Gunn, who had started building amplifiers in high school. These two Jims got into a serious amplifier contest, to see whose amplifier would fly inside the Wide Field/Planetary Camera. Janesick would build an amplifier, Gunn would build another, and Janesick would build one better. The quality of a CCD signal processor is determined by how many extra electrons of “noise” it introduces into the faint signal coming out of the CCD chip. The fewer noisy electrons, the cleaner and better the amplifier. “One electron may not sound like much,” Janesick said. “But in this business, one electron is worth a billion light-years.” Janesick’s circuits were powerful, elegant, and simple. Gunn’s were virtually indecipherable. “Gunn’s circuits were always better than mine by two electrons,” Janesick said. Gunn said, “If I can make something better by making it more complicated, then I will bloody well make it more complicated.” Janesick’s signal processor will fly inside the Wide Field/Planetary Camera and Gunn’s will not, because, as Gunn mildly put it, “My circuits might not survive the launch.”

  “In our naïveté or stupidity, Gunn and I probably think that we could build one of those cameras for as little as five million dollars,” Westphal said. “But NASA would refuse to fly it.” No nuts or washers shall come flying loose in zero gravity. No spaghetti pots shall be lashed to the Space Telescope. The Wiffpickers, as a team, were given about three hundred hours of observing time on the Space Telescope as their reward for designing the Wiffpick. The Wiffpickers had laid their plans, and their plans were imperial. They would point the Space Telescope into the hearts of quasars. They would try to find supermassive black holes. They would drill wildcat wells into lookback time, hoping to pull up images of galaxies in the tormentaria of birth, early in cosmic time. They would try to detect earthlike planets orbiting nearby stars. Of the Wide Field/Planetary Camera, Westphal said, “I just hope like hell the thing works.”

  The Wiffpick team holds collectively a depth of experience that encompasses the history of rocket-astronomy since World War II, from Jim Gunn’s nitric acid fireballs in Beeville to the experiments that actually inspired Gunn’s Beeville work, namely the V-2 rocket itself. One member of the Wiffpick team, William (“Billy”) Baum, is a veteran of Wernher von Braun’s V-2 days at the White Sands Proving Grounds. Historians of science credit Baum, along with Richard Tousey and a team of gadgeteers, for putting the first experiment into space. They wanted to capture a spectrum of the sun in ultraviolet light—something that had never been done before, because the earth’s atmosphere prevents most ultraviolet light from reaching the ground. They mounted a spectrograph inside the explosive warhead in the nose cone of a V-2. (“As to why we left the warhead in the rocket, all I can say is that perhaps we weren’t thinking clearly,” Baum recalled.) They fired the V-2 into space. The instrument took pictures of the sun until the rocket turned over and fell to earth. The rocket smacked into the desert and the warhead exploded in a tremendous blast and a puff of metallic confetti, and made a crater thirty feet across. For the next try, perhaps thinking more clearly this time, they removed the warhead from a V-2 and mounted a spectrograph on the tailfin of the V-2 in order to improve the instrument’s chances for survival, and on October 10, 1946, they fired the rocket. It climbed steadily to an altitude of fifty-five miles while a film snickered through the spectrograph, taking thirty-five good pictures of the sun’s spectrum in ultraviolet light. The rocket then yawed out of control and corkscrewed up to an altitude of one hundred miles while shedding pieces of itself. It came tumbling down to earth, and when it hit the ground it made a much smaller crater than the first, containing an intact tailfin from which dangled the world’s first space experiment.

  Billy Baum, a tall, courtly, soft-voiced, essentially bald man, who is given to wearing cardigan sweaters, is the type specimen of the Palomar gadgeteer. After fooling around with surplus Nazi rockets, Baum came to Palomar Mountain. It was he who mail-ordered the first batch of Army Air Corps electrical hot suits, for a dollar apiece. He built a pulse-counting photometer for the Hale Telescope in 1953—the first sensor ever put on the Hale that could count individual photons, one by one. Baum later went to live on Mars Hill at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. When he heard that Westphal and Gunn were planning to build a camera for the Space Telescope, he called them up and told them that he was joining the Wiffpick team. He began attending Wiffpick meetings. In his soft voice, Billy Baum gave the Wiffpickers some advice. He explained that if they put a little black dot on the mirrored pyramid, it would make a black dot in the pictures taken by the Wide Field/Planetary Camera. By moving the Space Telescope ever so slightly until the dot eclipsed a bright star, they might see things lying next to the star that would otherwise be drowned in the star’s light—dim planets, brown dwarf stars, rings of comet clouds, solar systems being born. Baum’s idea threw the Wiffpick team into a consternation. It horrified some of them. Why, every picture taken by the Wide Field/Planetary Camera would have an ugly little zit on it! That blemish—just think of it. When Wiffpick images were published on the front page of the New York Times, people would think that the Wiffpick had a flaw! The Wiffpickers named it the Baum Spot. Billy Baum kept on talking softly about his Spot until the team caved in and agreed to put a black dot on the pyramid—the Baum Spot. “Billy Baum’s presence on this team,” Gunn said, “is something we have ever been thankful for.”

  Shortly after the Wiffpick project got under way, Gunn spent about six months building a CCD camera of his own, an instrument that he named Pfooey. (“Pfooey,” Gunn said, “stands for Prime Focus Universal Extragalactic Instrument. PFUEI. Pfooey.”) Pfooey is a black cylinder containing a single sensor chip, a Nikon lens, and a labyrinth of recycled parts. Pfooey is plugged into prime focus of the Hale Telescope, where Pfooey needs constant tending by an observer who sits in prime focus with Pfooey. Pointed at a bright star, Pfooey can go haywire, provoking the astronomer to yell, “Aw, Pfooey!” In 1979, using Pfooey, Jim Gunn and four other astronomers (Jerry Kristian, Bev Oke, Jim Westphal, and the late Peter Young) mapped the first known gravitational lens. A gravitational lens is a multiple image of a quasar, split and magnified into two, three, or four bright mirages by the presence of a strong gravitational field somewhere in front of the quasar. The gravitational field warps spacetime, fracturing the image of the quasar into blobs. In this case the gravitational field came from a dim, heavy galaxy lying on the line of sight between the quasar and the Milky Way. This discovery is considered to be one of the classics in the annals of modern astronomy.

  Megascience dismayed Gunn and Westphal. They joked about kidnapping the Wiffpick. “Gunn and I said to each other, Let’s just better move the whole thing down here and just build the goddam thing ourselves,” said Westphal. They wondered if they could hide the Space Telescope’s camera in an underground maze at Caltech known as the Wastebasket, where perhaps nobody would find the camera until it was too late—after they had knitted the thing together with solder. “Jim and I feel the same way,” Westphal said. “Nobody is gonna take my soldering iron away from me.”

  When Gunn found himself unable to tinker with the Wide Field/Planetary Camera, the cacoethes gadgetendi began to gnaw at him. “I had this idea,” Gunn said, “that it would be nice to build a camera like the Wiffpick for the Hale Telescope. So I spent a weekend doing a set of preliminary drawings, to see if it would work. I presented the idea to Jim Westphal.” They figured costs. The camera looked cheap. They put in a funding request to NASA. NASA agreed to fund the camera out of the Wiffpick budget. Gunn next faced the question of how to get his hands on a tetrad of Space Telescope CCDs—almost a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of chips. He hung around the Jet Propulsion Lab, trying to act natural. After what Gunn describes as “a shady chain of events,” he managed to get his hands on four chips that had failed their flight qualification tests and would not work in outer space.

  Working at night and at odd hours, Gunn calculated formulas for groups of thick mirrors made of slu
gs of quartz fatter than tuna-fish cans, and hired an optician named Don Loomis to grind them. Gunn also produced a series of engineering drawings for his camera. He lined up Michael Carr, a Caltech engineer, to refine the drawings and to coordinate the building of the instrument. Carr knew a welder who took on scientific jobs, and he persuaded the welder to close up his shop for a day, to roll and weld 4-shooter’s steel tube.

  Carr felt that an extragalactic camera ought to be painted dead black, and he told Gunn so.

  “I want the tube white,” Gunn told Carr.

  “What about sort of a cream color?”

  “Stark white.”

  Carr eventually got to paint 4-shooter’s lid black. Carr built a wheeled cart to hold the tube upright, and he and Gunn pushed the cart and tube into a room next to the Wastebasket.

  The Wastebasket is Caltech’s answer to the aerospace industry—a warren of rooms beneath Jim Westphal’s office on the Caltech campus, inhabited by four engineers. Richard Lucinio, the digital wizard, occupies a central room with his two dogs, who doze on the floor while he taps at a computer terminal. In a corner, under a battery of fluorescent lamps, dwells J. DeVere Smith, once a television repairman and now the wizard of circuitry. Beside a tiny machine shop dwells the wizard of cables, Jovanni Chang. Near the Wastebasket’s doorway dwells the wizard of moving parts, Victor Nenow. The wizards maintain passageways to connect their work areas, through which they can walk and receive air, and through which I walked one day, unable to believe the shelves groaning with solder-clotted wires, the cardboard boxes filled with broken electrical units and bits of machinery, the torched and hacksawed circuit boards, the tape recorders, gears, oscilloscopes, keyboards, chunks of foam rubber, magnets, wrenches, telephone books, and toasted and reamed computer terminals. There were dozens of steel cabinets subdivided into small drawers. I pulled open drawer after drawer, and each seemed to hold a different type of bolt or knob or transistor. “If you move something in those drawers”—the wizard of moving parts, Victor Nenow, said in a muffled voice, because he was speaking to me from around a corner—“you are in big trouble, because our short-term memories are no good.”