The UA's first major stride in space sciences came in 1916, when a $60,000 gift led to the establishment of the Steward Observatory, shown here in 1928.

Photos by NASA/JPL, University of Arizona

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Andrew Ellicott Douglass had a dream, a Harvard background and some of the greatest skies in the world.

"We have the best location of any educational institution in America," the pioneering astronomer wrote in 1916. "The university ought to make itself famous with a telescope."

Douglass chased that dream for nearly a decade as he struggled to build a world-class telescope on the University of Arizona campus, seeking to take advantage of the same mountain peaks and wide-open skies that first brought him to the state.

He had come to Arizona in 1894 at the behest of Percival Lowell, a wealthy Boston businessman who harbored a lifelong fascination with Mars. Lowell conceived of an observatory in the remote West that could provide optimal viewing, and he chose Douglass to select a site and supervise the construction of what became Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

When Douglass left after seven years, he became the first in a long line of adventurous scientists whose discoveries and innovation have positioned the UA as a world leader in space science.

When Douglass joined the UA's faculty in 1906, the only equipment was a secondhand 4-inch telescope. Douglass later persuaded his old colleagues at Harvard to lend the university an 8-inch scope, but that wasn't enough.

He wanted an observatory that would take advantage of Tucson's "unequaled atmosphere and climate." To get it, he wrote to legislators, scientists and philanthropists, and he used his renowned 1910 Halley's comet observations as proof of Tucson's unique potential.

The local press took up his case. A 1910 editorial in the Arizona Daily Star predicted: "Tucson would then be the Meca (sic) to which all astronomical eyes the world over would be directed. The fame of its observatory would be greater than any other institution of like character in the United States. The atmospheric conditions are such as to demand recognition and consideration from the scientific men of all nations."

He finally succeeded in 1916, when Oracle resident Lavinia Steward donated $60,000 in memory of her late husband. In April 1923, the Steward Observatory was dedicated, and work began with a 36-inch telescope. Douglass' "astronomer's paradise" was a reality — and a midcentury flood of researchers settled at the UA as the era of quaint stargazing gave way to the space race.

The expense of new, large telescopes and the growing demand for a year-round observation site sparked a push in the early 1950s that led to the creation of a national observatory, set just outside Tucson.

Aden B. Meinel of the Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago was selected in 1955 to lead a survey of 150 mountain ranges and pick the best site for the national observatory. The search quickly narrowed to sites in the desert Southwest — four in Arizona and one in California. Kitt Peak had the edge with its clear weather, steady atmosphere and proximity to the UA's astronomy program. The Kitt Peak National Observatory was founded on a sacred Tohono O'odham mountaintop in 1958.

At the same time Meinel was scouring the Southwest for an observatory site, a former colleague at Yerkes Observatory was leading a charge — wildly unpopular at the time — to persuade astronomers to stop looking as far away as possible and instead concentrate on our own solar system. The "father of modern planetary astronomy," Gerard P. Kuiper, used the world's third-largest telescope to conduct close observations of the moon — research that his associate, Ewen Whitaker, says was seen as a "sacrilege" by most astronomers of the day.

"Nobody was interested at all," says Whitaker, now retired in Tucson. "Everybody was interested the big telescopes and the galaxies. The moon, that stupid lump of rock up there that lights up the night sky, was very, very low-key, and he wanted to change this with his lunar atlas."

At an astronomical conference in 1955, Kuiper sought to convince fellow scientists of what he saw as a pressing need for an advanced, detailed photographic lunar map, made up of large-scale, high-resolution images. Though he received little response at the time, Kuiper secured a National Science Foundation grant for the project in April 1957 — six months before the launch of Sputnik signaled the dawn of the Space Age.

The geopolitical competition gave Kuiper's in-progress lunar atlas a large and unexpected dose of attention. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was founded in 1958, and it immediately declared reaching the moon to be a prime objective. Kuiper's team finished the lunar atlas in 1960, but growing discontent between his focus and other priorities at Yerkes led him to seek another home.

In Kuiper's mind, the time was right to launch a new planetary institute, and he believed the government's interest in the moon would yield golden funding opportunities, Whitaker says. Like Lowell and Meinel before him, Kuiper zeroed in on the Southwest for its clear night skies.

At the UA, President Richard A. Harvill was seeking to raise the university's research profile and jumped at the chance to lure Kuiper. After a whirlwind courtship, Kuiper's team arrived in 1960 to start the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Kuiper — bright, brash and zealously dedicated to observational work — already was a superstar when he came to Tucson. He had established that Saturn's moon Titan has a methane atmosphere; that Saturn's rings are made of water ice; that carbon dioxide dominates the atmospheres of both Mars and Venus; and that the Martian polar caps undergo seasonal growth and recession.

In 1961, NASA appointed Kuiper to its Space Science Steering Committee, which started work on what became the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the moon. The first five spacecraft failed, and the project was reorganized in 1963 with Kuiper as the lead scientist.

"I thought going to the moon, that'll take another 20 or 30 years," says Whitaker, a lunar-mapping expert who wrote an early history of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "It really burst in upon us."

Ranger 6 marked another failure, but on July 31, 1964, Ranger 7 reached the moon, becoming the United States' first successful mission to another body in our solar system. The UA's Kuiper led the mission's science program.

Kuiper announced the results in a prime-time national news conference, saying, "This is a great day for science, and this is a great day for the United States." Pictures sent back from the moon had a resolution 1,000 times greater than anything seen before and "heralded the era of instant science," Whitaker wrote.

Using the Ranger photos, Kuiper was able to calculate the "bearing strength" of the moon's surface, settling the scientific debate about whether the moon could support a landing spacecraft or whether deep layers of dust would swallow it up.

Kuiper was known as "the benevolent dictator," Whitaker wrote, and his lab was nicknamed the "loony lab." But the intense focus he brought to his research and his extraordinary breakthroughs made the UA's four-year-old program a major force in space exploration.

"His whole existence centered around the advancement of our knowledge of the solar system," Whitaker wrote. With craters on the moon, Mars and Mercury, Kuiper is the only name appearing on three different bodies in the solar system, and he's also the namesake of the Kuiper Belt.

Kuiper's first graduate students and faculty hires were pioneers.

Frank J. Low says he came to the UA in 1964 as an "almost embarrassingly young" full professor. But as the inventor of a new detector that ushered in modern infrared astronomy, his academic ticket was punched. He could have gone anywhere, but he chose the UA so he could work with Kuiper.

"Gerard was really an astrophysicist, basically, but he says, 'Look, here we're opening up the studies of the planets,' " Low said. "There was a basic understanding of stars already, but on the other hand, the planets had been treated in a haphazard fashion."

Low, a recipient of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's lifetime achievement award, says that from the beginning, his desire to explore the infrared spectrum was borne of a recognition of how expansive the research could become.

"It's really beautiful because stars are born, and then around them planets appear. It's a field which goes all the way to stars that are just beginning to form," Low says.

The first infrared astronomy, which observes light that has longer wavelengths than people can see, was ground-based, and though it was revolutionary, was limited by the Earth's atmosphere. In the early 1970s, Low made a breakthrough, putting a 12-inch telescope on a Learjet so it could fly above most of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. The relatively small telescope made new and significant infrared observations of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus, as well as more distant galaxies.

The next step for Low and infrared astronomers was developing a much larger flying observatory, named the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which had a 35-inch telescope and flew at altitudes higher than eight miles. It operated from 1974 to 1995, making more than 1,400 flights before being decommissioned to make way for a more advanced flying observatory, currently in testing.

Low's work spanned ground, air and space as the infrared field matured. He continued up through the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was launched in 2003 and carried instruments he devised to shrink the system that cools the infrared detectors to almost absolute zero. Now retired, he has watched as his apprentices — including George Rieke, now a regents' professor — have taken infrared astronomy to new heights, with more profound discoveries still to be made.

"The amount of data will be the historic results, will define the accomplishments," Low says. "And there's an ongoing wave."

The UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Steward Observatory were just two parts of the equation of its success in the 1960s.

Meinel, Kitt Peak's founding director, joined the UA in 1961 as an astronomy professor, and his breakthroughs in optics not only led to a new generation of telescopes, but formed the core of another world-class UA program.

Astronomers had been somewhat stymied since the late 1940s, when conventional glass mirror telescopes reached their practical limit. Starting in the late 1960s, the idea of making larger telescopes using a series of smaller mirrors started gaining traction among younger astronomers, but it was such a paradigm shift that most veterans in the field dismissed it.

At the UA, Meinel was a leading proponent of this new telescope design. When the Defense Department canceled a manned orbital laboratory project in 1969, he had his chance. Meinel slyly talked the Air Force into giving him the seven leftover 72-inch mirror blanks, and he began work on what would become the Multiple Mirror Telescope. He eventually got funding by selling the National Science Foundation on the idea.

Meinel, who initially used the name "Project Colt" for the telescope's six-mirror design, published a paper describing the telescope in 1970. His paper led to a collaboration between the UA and Fred Whipple at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which offered a location near the top of Mount Hopkins, south of Tucson. After a lengthy development and construction period, the telescope saw first light on May 9, 1979, and would remain in service until 1998. Nearly everything about the telescope broke from convention, from its mirrors and optical system to its alignment and mounts.

"There were two or three dozen innovative ideas that were put into that telescope," says Robert Shannon, a retired UA optical sciences professor who was responsible for building the optics on the Multiple Mirror Telescope and went on to become director of the Optical Sciences Center from 1982 to 1992. "Virtually all of them, including the idea of multiple mirrors, are used in the large telescopes being built nowadays."

The UA's role in advancing the space sciences continues today.

The success of the Multiple Mirror Telescope motivated astronomer Roger Angel to try to figure out how to build even bigger mirrors. In what's become almost a folk tale, Angel started a series of backyard experiments using an improvised kiln and glass custard cups. Able to successfully fuse two together, he kept experimenting, eventually devising a honeycomb structure that could produce mirrors that were both lightweight and stable.

His breakthrough led right back to scopes constructed with a single, large mirror.

"We actually knew before I even tinkered with the first piece of glass that what I wanted to make was an 8-meter mirror," Angel says. "It was very much top-down investigation."

The Steward Observatory Mirror Lab was started in 1980, and in 1985 it moved to its current location, under the east wing of the football stadium. Today it manufactures the largest mirrors in the world, melting borosilicate glass in a rotating kiln. In addition to refitting the Multiple Mirror Telescope with a single 6.5-meter mirror, the lab has produced three 8.4-meter mirrors and is casting six more for the Giant Magellan Telescope, a next-generation scope that will be far and away the world's largest when it's completed in 2016.

On Friday, NASA is scheduled to launch the Phoenix Mars lander, with the UA as the first public university to lead a Mars mission.

Shannon, the retired optical sciences professor, credits the total collection of UA strengths, from optics to the Lunar and Planetary Lab to the Steward Observatory.

"Clearly it is the world's leading center," he says.