Christopher T. Russell

Russell:

My mother and I were in London, England, during the Second World War and my father was a soldier. He had come over to England from Canada. He came over to fight. He met my mother and they got married. Then he went off to France. The soldiers crossed the channel to Dieppe, France, and he was killed, a little under nine months before I was born. My mother bore me just north of London in a place called St. Albans.

We went back to London and we lived there until 1944. In 1944 we came across the Atlantic in an ocean liner with submarines still operating in the Atlantic. So it was pretty scary for the people on the boat, except I was totally unaware of any of this. I enjoyed the boat ride. In fact, one of my flashbacks that I have is a scene on the boat looking down into the engine room and really enjoying the view.

We immigrated to Canada and I was raised mainly in Toronto, Canada, with my grandparents. My mother wanted to work to help support us, and00 eventually the grandparents decided to leave Toronto. So I got an early start on my education by going to school a year earlier. I did fine in school.

My mother eventually remarried and gave me two brothers and a sister. I skipped another grade, and I think it was probably four and went straight to five from three. So I got two years ahead and I was always grateful for that. I considered that period of my life to be OK, but it was good to accelerate and get into adulthood earlier. I was advanced by another year, but I was in the Canadian school system, and at that time there were five years in high school, with a grade 13. So then I lost a year relative to the U.S. system, but I had gained two earlier. Then I entered the University of Toronto in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry.

So when I was just ready to graduate from U of T, I thought I would get a real job for the summer before the time I went off to graduate school. By the way, I never had any idea that I would do anything except go to grad school. It was not in my psyche at all to do anything other than take as much education as I could.

So I filled out a summer job application and sent it off to Ottawa, to the government and said, give me something. And fortunately, they gave me a summer job at a research institute near Ottawa where we would catch a bus from downtown Ottawa to the Research Institute every day. And I got to study data from the first spacecraft that Canada had built. The United States launched it, but it was a Canadian-built satellite and it flew through the Earth's upper atmosphere and ionosphere, where it was receiving signals from the sun.

I studied those signals and learned a little bit about the Sun in that summer job. Nothing ever happened to that work except that possibly the supervisor of the students published some articles without telling the students that he had used the data. That was my first introduction to scientific research and I got to study the Sun. So I felt very privileged.

Behrman:

What had been your experiences with science in high school and primary school?

Russell:

I liked science, but my experience in high school was that you would take some tests and the guidance counselor would look at the scores and say, you'd be really great as an engineer. And I knew that I would not be great as an engineer. I didn't want to be an engineer. I had an idea of what engineers did. I wanted to actually investigate science on my own.

And so I was just interested in going into physics. I didn't know what area of physics I wanted to work in, but I thought I would want to go to a university with a good physics program. So I enrolled at the University of Toronto, from which I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree with a gold medal in mathematics. I had taken a number of aptitude tests as I neared graduation, and I received a note from the University of California that they would be happy to give me a fellowship or at least a TA-ship and support. And since I didn't have a lot of support, I thought that was attractive. I knew where Los Angeles was and I liked its location. [Laughs] So I came down here and, sure enough, it fulfilled my expectations. The climate was nice. UCLA is situated fairly near the ocean, so it gets the sea breeze. I now live close to UCLA, about 20 minutes to work, in a nice environment.

After a year, in the physics department and teaching undergraduates in their physics labs, I decided to poke my nose around the campus and find out whether there was any group working in space. I found a group that had been approved to put instruments on six spacecraft, three in low altitude orbit and three in a high altitude orbit, which would go well beyond the Earth's atmosphere into the solar wind.

It was in an area in which I was interested, looking at the physics of the interaction of the sun, the solar wind, with the Earth. And so I asked if they had a place available in the group and they did. So at the end of my first year in the physics department, I got a research assistant position, and that is what I did for the rest of my time as a graduate student. I did research in the Earth's interaction with the solar wind on this spacecraft series. And so I ended up graduating from what turned out eventually to be the Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences Department. It went through a number of name changes, but I basically graduated as a geophysicist rather than just a physicist. But that was fine. Geophysicists do what I like to do.

And so I graduated in four years and a quarter. In the middle of that, I returned to Toronto to marry my wife, whom I had met before I left Toronto. And I believe I wrote her a letter every night during that entire period. I think she may have kept them. [Laughs] With my PhD in hand, I started off in January 1969, to work as a research geophysicist at UCLA in what was called the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

Behrman:

And how did that transition happen? Going from a graduate student to then the research scientist?

Russell:

I think I changed offices. So, I just worked in the same group. I did not change groups. I just changed jobs titles.

Behrman:

Who was your advisor or mentor?

Russell:

My advisor was Professor Robert Holzer. He had been an atmospheric scientist interested in lightning, and he came to UCLA and got a faculty position and worked his way up the ranks. And he eventually got in contact with Dr. Ed Smith, who worked at JPL, who may also at one time have been a student at UCLA.

When Ed started to make instrumentation for spacecraft that would be launched into space, he teamed up with Professor Holzer. And then Professor Holzer did the scientific analysis and Ed Smith built the instrument with the help of American industry. And so they had a group going and it was a successful group. These six spacecraft were launched once each year. In those days it was really a good time to launch spacecraft. If it didn't work really well, you fixed the next one to be launched and started over. Whatever went wrong with that one, you fixed it on the next one. And by number six, it was working really well. We don't do it quite that way anymore.

I cut my teeth on this Orbiting Geophysical Observatory series and got to learn about everything in the area of electromagnetic waves from basically the surface of the Earth out into the solar wind interaction with the Earth. The first spacecraft didn't hold its inertial stabilization. It was supposed to be three-axis stabilized and oriented, but it lost that stabilization and started to spin.

Behrman:

Oh dear.

Russell:

But that was good because then the spinning helped measure the background magnetic field. You could see what the steady field was because the spacecraft was rotating. And that gave us much more physical insight. You can't always trust, at least you couldn't back then, your other experimenters on the spacecraft to give you their data. Now, data doesn't belong to the investigator, the data belongs to the government. I remember, not fondly, a story somebody reported to me that when a certain engineer retired and left JPL, he went into his office and took out all the magnetic tapes that had been obtained for storing data from the mission and just got rid of them.

Behrman:

Oh wow.

Russell:

That wouldn't happen anymore. That's a legacy of data that just disappeared. But that was the way that some people were thinking back then. Fortunately, things have changed in that area. But anyways, we got to measure the environment of the Earth in the solar wind. And that got me really interested in what we were doing. I also got a chance to work on the Apollo program because I changed mentors from the search magnetometer coil into another group on the fifth satellite of the series, OGO-5, and worked with Paul Coleman for a number of years. And that is how I transitioned into the Apollo program, because he had then said, well, why don't we make a small satellite? Like a CubeSat today, but they hadn't coined the term yet.

And it fit in like a mailbox, a postal box that you might find on a country lane, about that size. And you pushed it out of the box into space, and then it opened up its booms and antennas and stuff and then broadcast back from the moon and we got data in lunar orbit. And that measured the full magnetic field and not just the waves as we had done on the OGO spacecraft.

I got to examine the Apollo data, which was taken very close to the moon. There were other lunar orbiters earlier, but they were further away. So we had some rough idea of what the moon's field was like, but I was now able to measure it very carefully. And also the changes of the magnetic field induced in the moon when the moon changed from one environment to another, which is very useful because the moon has an iron core. And we didn't know how big the iron core was.

But the iron core repels the magnetic field. The magnetic field does not go into the core very far. It can't because it's metallic. It takes a long time, like thousands and thousands of years. And so it wraps around this inner core. And you can measure that effect, at the altitude where these satellites were. So I was able to detect the lunar core well before the seismometers and the seismologists were able to. In fact, it was like 30 years later before the seismologists finally got a good analysis of that data they took during the Apollo program. And they had the advantage of having their instruments sitting down on the surface of the moon. But anyways, they got the same number, which I'm glad they did.

So I worked on the Apollo program until it ended, and then I realized a really important principle, and that was that you could write to the government and ask for money and they might give it to you.

Behrman:

[Laughs]

Russell:

And so I started sending in proposals to NASA and, to my great surprise, the first three spacecraft, well, three of the first four spacecraft that I applied for... there was a mission called the International Sun Earth Explorers, and they had a one, two and three version. And one and two were going to go around the Earth in a very highly elliptical orbit and that would fly right beside one another. And then you could see disturbances go from one to the other so you could time them and get their velocity, which is really useful. And so they gave me the magnetometers on both of those.

But the third spacecraft was going to be set out in the solar wind further from the Earth to measure what was coming from the sun to the earth. And they didn't award me that. I got a report from somebody who said that he overheard, that the Selection Committee said, well, we can't give Chris all three instruments. [Both Laugh] So apparently there was a limit on the amount of work they would give me.

But I sent in a proposal also in parallel with the Sun-Earth Explorers to put a magnetometer on the Pioneer Venus orbiter, and it was selected.

Behrman:

Right.

Russell:

That was also a pleasant surprise because I was able for the first time to do a lot of Venus science and discovered that Venus had lightning. I learned a lot of lessons as I went along. And one thing is that some people, or all people possibly, develop ideas that they believe are absolutely true for reasons that really aren't absolutely right, and no amount of evidence will shake them of this belief.

It turned out that Venus lightning became controversial because some people just said, oh, Venus can't have lightning. And I don't know why, because you look at Venus and it's got clouds, and clouds are turbulent air with particles in them and those particles can charge up and then get very high voltages in Earth's atmosphere. And Venus’ atmosphere wasn't all that different. It was hotter basically, but there was no planetary magnetic field at Venus.

So I didn't understand why some people develop these other opinions. However, later in life, I realized that people develop ideas without much information and then hold them firmly because they developed them. And it's hard to, after you come to a conclusion, even with scant data, to change your mind. You've invested your something or other, reputation perhaps, in a particular idea and you stick with it. It's yours to defend to the death, essentially. And people do become very emotional over certain ideas.

So if you are looking for the first thing that I really learned, I got to the realization that that paradigms, when they get established, are very hard to overturn. These science ideas that get held so firmly were set in people's minds and in the literature well before there was sufficient evidence to firmly establish them.

And so the early days were at times of changing paradigms, and you don't change paradigms easily in science. Venus lightning was one place where I had to fight strongly and defend the data that we were getting on the Pioneer Venus Spacecraft. But back on Earth there was another controversy brewing, the control of geomagnetic disturbances by the sun and the solar wind. One of the things that the Earth’s magnetic field does is called reconnection. And don't ask me why it's reconnection and not just a connection.

Behrman:

[Laughs]

Russell:

But the person who was the leading guru in favor of magnetic reconnection between the sun's magnetic field as it carried out to the Earth and the Earth's magnetic field, was a very smart person, but not a very good sort of explainer of what he did. He did not convince many people that his ideas about the interaction of the solar magnetic field and the Earth's magnetic field were correct. And this person was Professor Jim Dungey, and he was at Imperial College London, although he spent a short period in the United States. And he was a very bright and a bit eccentric. And that probably helped people to be able to ignore him, even though this bright eccentric was really bright.

When I came into the field, it was obvious to me from the measurements in space and how the Earth reacted to the interplanetary magnetic field, that the Earth's magnetic field was really strongly controlled by the interplanetary field. So I became an advocate of this reconnection theory and I ran into strong opposition to people who had started studying geomagnetic activity prior to the age of the space missions. So they made up their minds early before we had all the data. Of course, back when you start off, you don't know what more data will come in the future. I had to bring the community through this stage of changing the paradigm from an Earth-centric idea of the geomagnetic activity to a solar wind centric theory where the solar wind properties controlled what the Earth's magnetic field did. So that led to the first scientist to ever strike me. And this was Syun-Ichi Akasofu. And I remember it to this day I was in the lobby of the hotel, the main hotel in Ottawa, Canada, the Chateau Laurier. He walked through the lobby and I was going the other way, and he came up to me and he hit me in the shoulder and said the famous words, "I always wanted to do that." [Both Laugh]

Behrman:

So quite literally he struck you.

Russell:

Yes. [Laughs] But we have never not been really friends after that. You know, he did fight the idea strongly. He hit hard but he didn't hurt me. [Both Laugh]

And I have been also choked by the wife of a scientist. So apparently some scientists go home and they complain to their wives about me. Choked with my own tie.

Behrman:

Oh my.

Russell:

Oh, oh, yes. So anyway, I guess there is some price to pay for speaking your mind at times. I'm still alive many years later so I think some of that must have been in fun.

Where were we?

Behrman:

Oh, I think we were talking about the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the solar wind. Was it on Pioneer that you were first principal investigator? That was your first?

Russell:

No, actually, I was principal investigator for ISEE 1 and 2. And, well, the Pioneer Venus, I may have got selected first, ahead of ISEE 1 and 2, but ISEE 1 and 2 got launched a little earlier. So the answer is probably yes, it's the time I was first a principal investigator. But the three of them, ISEE 1 and 2, and Pioneer Venus came all at the same time. So basically so we had to build them at the same time and operate at the same time.

And both missions lasted the order of 10 years, I think Pioneer Venus might have been eleven and ISEE 1 and 2, nine, but it was that order. So they were good long missions. And we did a lot of stuff with them. And, you know, as a result of that, in 1977, I got the AGU Macelwane Award for promising young scientists. Up to that year, in 1976, it had been a single award each year, and in 1977 and thereafter, there were three awards. So I guess I came along at the right time. There's no guarantee that I would have won the Macelwane award if there was only one of them being given.

OK. And that same year, they were selecting for the Galileo mission to Jupiter. And so I decided to do something different. I didn't want to give up building the magnetometer for the mission. But what I did is I asked a colleague, Margaret Kivelson, to be the principal investigator, and she eagerly took my suggestion.

And I proposed to be what's called an interdisciplinary scientist on the mission. So they had a group of senior scientists and, although I was not really senior in age, I was senior in what I had accomplished by that point. And so they selected me as an interdisciplinary scientist and they selected UCLA and Margaret Kivelson to build the instrument and it went to Jupiter eventually. But it was one of those times that NASA really lost its ability to put spacecraft into orbit the way they'd intended. So they were working with the space shuttle and they had stopped building things that were small rockets that would not were powerful, but they made this big thing and then let it carry a rocket up and then fire that rocket and put it on its way. They thought that that would be a better way of doing it. But we've gone back to launching from the ground and not trying to take something up in space and launch it. We did it. But it was quite difficult. And the mission got delayed because of that particular policy and the difficulty of the launching.

But the mission to go to Jupiter was really, really a good thing to do. It's an active planet in the sense that the Earth is active in a way. It has an energy source on the inside that does power earthquakes and mountain building and stuff on Earth. Jupiter is much more active and it can generate very large disturbances in its magnetosphere because it has volcanoes that inject gas into the magnetosphere directly from the Moon Io.

So we got to Jupiter with Galileo and we just had a ball. Really, the four Galilean Satellites were each interesting and we flew by them all. And we had an orbit that went far out into the Jovian magnetosphere and got to explore that. And it was really sad then when we had to end the mission and deposit it into the planet itself. But one of my first graduate students, Claudia Alexander, was in charge of the mission as it deposited itself into Jupiter. So she started a tradition of my students getting rid of spacecraft on planetary surfaces.

Later, Rick Elphic disposed of one on the surface of the moon, and the lead scientist on the Cassini mission, Linda Spilker, also my graduate student, got to deposit to Cassini deep inside of Saturn. So there's a tradition there. Maybe I just trained too many graduate students so statistics had a role, too.

Behrman:

Well, there's also a correlation with your getting involved in a number of spacecraft.

Russell:

Right. That also was good for my students who inadvertently or advertently, I don't know which, that by my involvement in all of those missions were supplied with the funds that enabled a large number of students to pass through my program.

So I was well funded in those early years. That was good. Maybe I was smarter than I thought I was, but I'm humbled by that.

Behrman:

[Laughs] You mentioned Cassini.

Russell:

Yes, I mentioned Cassini. Cassini was not a UCLA magnetometer program. I proposed, and Margaret Kivelson with me, to build the magnetometer for Cassini. However, it was won by a consortium in England headed by David Southwood. And so there was a three-way competition, two American and one European. If you assume that sometimes Britain is European. They would deny it, certainly.

But it was a joint mission with Europe, the Cassini mission. And so some of the instruments would go to the other side of the Atlantic and some would come to this side of the Atlantic. And they decided that the Imperial College led group in London would then build the magnetometer.

Well, it turns out that David Southwood had done a postdoc at UCLA, but I don't think he used our magnetometer designs. He had started his own group at Imperial College and had a different design, but he had a familiarity based on spending time at UCLA. And he was a nice guy and he liked us. And he made a very gracious offer to everybody who lost. There was a group at Goddard who were also turned down and the UCLA group that was turned down. And he offered everybody the opportunity to join him. And the Goddard Group thumbed their noses at him and did not take him up on his offer. But UCLA did take him up on the offer and so we joined him on Cassini.

And then he built the instrument but he allowed us to do a lot of data processing and analysis and so that we got a lot of work out of it. We developed programs to process the data and to analyze the data. And so it was a very productive mission for us. And my students learned a lot from the mission. And, in Linda Spilker's case. She went quickly up the ladder. She went to JPL, moved up through the ranks and became the lead scientist on the project. And so that was that was a good, good thing.

During that period of time, I had another mission, called the Polar Mission, around the Earth. And it was successful and looked at the magnetosphere in regions that hadn't been studied before, but it wasn't quite the same as the pioneering ISEE missions and the Galileo and Cassini missions. They were something special.

However, during that period of time when Polar was starting up and Cassini was going, there was a 1992 workshop in San Juan Capistrano that was just an hour away, now an hour and a half drive away. It's a little longer now even though we have wider freeways since the number of cars increased faster than the number of freeway lanes.

But anyway, there was a nice workshop and it was on ‘what do we do next’. What things should we be doing? It introduced a new program called Discovery. And the idea was that we get away from NASA running a mission, but we would make the mission small enough that just a single principal investigator could put together a team and build the spacecraft and fly it. And then we get smaller, better, cheaper missions. And so this Discovery program was set up to get a new type of investigator out there in a new type of mission.

And I don't know if Dan Goldin was the NASA administrator at the time, but it was about that epoch where we were trying to do things smaller, faster, cheaper. So I went to the Discovery workshop, and there was a person there who was a NASA engineer from Glenn in Ohio, Cleveland, Ohio. And he was talking about ion propulsion. And ion propulsion takes up tanks of gas into space and then accelerates the gas to very high velocity so that it can act as a very efficient fuel. When you take up a tank of ordinary gas to burn, oxygen and something else, then you get a certain velocity of the engine, of the gas out the engine, and that gives you your momentum but it's limited to how fast that fuel can be accelerated by burning it.

Behrman:

Right.

Russell:

And if you can get a strong electric field and you ionize your gas and send it out through this nozzle, then it can reach extremely high velocities. And so this looked promising to me, but this engineer would keep using a whole bunch of Earth examples. You could do this around the Earth, that around the Earth and stuff. But I said, wait a second, we really want to go to the planets, OK? And, you know, we want to orbit the planets and stuff. There are better ways to use these engines. And so I went up to him and I said, that's dumb, or something to that effect.

Behrman:

[Laughs]

Russell:

I didn't really make good first impressions. And I said, do you know how can we help you to apply these engines in a realm that is very useful? This meeting we're going to was sponsored by the planetary office of NASA. It wasn't scheduled for orbits around the Earth; it's for going out into space. And so let's study what we can do. And he said, well, we have done some studies. We're willing to do some more and we're willing to pay you guys to come out and advise us.

So I put together a team that had a number of females on it as well as males, which was novel at that time. And I kept that ratio through the mission when we finally got it approved. We went out to Glenn a number of times and worked with their mission design people and were able to design a number of different missions. And I had a dumb idea. I've had several dumb ideas. And the dumb idea I had here was to use the ion engine to make an inexpensive lunar mission in which we would spiral down to a low altitude and then spiral back up and then leave the moon and then go after another object. So I had the moon in mind as well as a small body that was flying by the Earth and we would do both of those objects.

Dan Goldin really was in charge at this particular point for the first Discovery selection. And there was somebody, Alan Binder was his name, who had a really simple idea for a lunar mission, which was really cheap and did a few things but nothing fancy, and it just went into a single orbit. And so his mission got selected and came in at low cost. But Alan got bored with the mission at the end and just said, OK, it's time to get rid of it, and then after it made its proposed measurements, he didn't do anything more with it and let it crash into the surface of the Moon. And I probably cried at that point because we didn't get to do something fancy. But to give NASA and Alan Binder credit, everything was done on cost and it was cheap. And so that gave NASA confidence in this Discovery program.

It continued. When Discovery two came along, I, being a little wiser, said the Moon has now been done for the areas that I wanted to do, Binder had done it. And so I'm going to take the Moon off my agenda and I'm going to do something that is really interesting but I can't really decide between A and B. OK, so I made maybe my second big mistake in my career I proposed two missions. What is wrong with proposing two missions? OK, give them a choice, right? No. The paradigm you should have in mind is you have a certain number of friends. And your friends are scattered on these various selection committees. But your friends might not know better than you of which of your two missions to pick. Half might go for Mission A and vote against Mission B. Another half might go for Mission B and vote against A. So I sent in these two mission proposals. I worked twice as hard as anybody else writing a proposal because I wrote two. And neither of them won even though they were both really good ideas. So that was stupid. Being young doesn't necessarily make you smart, but maybe with age you get wiser.

Then another two years later, the idea that I had seemed right, but NASA had made an ion propelled spacecraft by then just to test out the concept. They didn't go out and do anything really exciting scientifically, but they had put together a spacecraft with an ion engine on it. This is good because then I have something that I can copy the next time or this time, you learn a little bit about it. However, this spacecraft got launched just when the Selection Committee for Discovery Program three was meeting and the engine didn't start.

Behrman:

Oh dear.

Russell:

Yes. Eventually they got it started after a month of trying. OK, but this little failure came at a really, really bad time during the mission selection, so I didn't get selected again.

Behrman:

Oh my.

Russell:

So that was three in a row I struck out. But two years later, the ion propelled mission that NASA had sent up to test ion propulsion had done really well when it got its engine going finally.

And it showed that mobility around the solar system, doing all of the things that I would do with it. I was proposing to go out to the asteroid Vesta. For Vesta, we had samples on Earth that we thought (at least some of us thought) had come from Vesta. They got knocked off Vesta during collisional events and then made their way through the intervening space and landed on Earth. These rocks looked just like rocks you would expect from Vesta.

So of my first, second, and third proposals, the ones for which I did not get selected, two targeted Vesta. And we would fly to Vesta and use our ion engine to lower the orbit to low altitudes and take our instruments down just above the, basically just 100 or 200 kilometers above the surface of Vesta. Something never been done before. We would enter Vesta orbit and lower ourselves to near the surface.

But with opportunity four, I was not a person to leave well enough alone. And I realized that we could put on enough fuel to do not only Vesta. We could go to Vesta, and then go down close to the surface and back up and then go off to Ceres. Because Ceres, the biggest body in the asteroid belt, could be reached at that opportunity. So I proposed that. I'm not one for being conservative. I proposed this in my fourth attempt in over eight years to win a mission in the Discovery race. And, lo and behold, there were three finalists. And one finalist was Ed Smith, with whom I had worked on some of the many of the earlier missions. And then he was going to go to Jupiter and get into a low altitude orbit and he called it Inside Jupiter, but later became Juno. And then another, Bill Borucki, with whom I had worked on the Pioneer Venus Project. So I had worked with both of the competition. Bill was trying to look at exoplanets by looking at occultations in front of stars. That was the Kepler mission. And that was a really, really, really, really, really, really, really good mission. And it got selected and lasted many years and really started a lot of exoplanet research.

Behrman:

What was his name? (See above).

Russell:

However, I also got selected and I got selected first. It was clearly one, two and three. And Ed Smith and his Jupiter mission was third. And they decided that they had enough money for both the Kepler mission and the Dawn mission. So Ed Smith lost out and, unfortunately, he did not get a chance to propose the mission again. People in his group proposed and they won the next time around. So the Jupiter mission got done and is in orbit at the present time. So all three of the missions that were finalists eventually got flown, but Bill Borucki's Mission, Kepler, and my mission, Dawn, got to go up first. Now, I did something magnanimous for Borucki and got him started. He came up to me and said, Chris, is there any way that I can get early funding on this? And I said, well, they offered me five million dollars of early funding, but I really don't need it. And why don't you take the five million dollars and get your spectrometer going that you need and so... And I really didn't need it and so everything went fine. I didn't make a mistake. And so we got the Kepler mission going, starting a little bit ahead of the Dawn mission. But Dawn had the shorter development period.

Now, life is not easy, and we went through some rocky times on Dawn. And so it got canceled twice in development and restored both times. It turns out that there are a number of people in the administration of NASA who come from different disciplines. And basically the people in different disciplines don't understand what's going on in the other disciplines and think that their discipline is more important. And so even though people get appointed in these broad administrative areas, they still have their favorites. And, when they see maybe their favorite mission having trouble and they need to get money from some other program, they do that.

I was fortunate enough to overcome these difficulties in my program. And I credit good people at JPL who knew how to do things properly and fight back and win the day. One was Charles Elachi, in particular, who was the director of JPL at the time. I will never, ever thank him enough. He really saved us there.

So we got the launch. We launched late because there were difficulties, but... Well, let's put it this way, we got launched on the last opportunity to really do the Dawn mission the way we planned to do it, which was to go to Vesta and Ceres. When we got out into space, space was not necessarily as friendly as we had hoped. But, every so often people lose their recipes. Now, if you lose your recipe in your kitchen, then you go and start searching through other cookbooks and see if you can find another recipe. But when you lose your recipe and you launched already and the thing that you made with that recipe turned sour, then you got a problem. The recipe that was long lost by a company, from whom we bought equipment, was how to make reaction wheels, which control how the spacecraft is pointed. So these wheels spin and spin and spin and you can spin them one way and spin them the other way. Then you don't have to fire gas to control how your spacecraft points. And so we started losing reaction wheels when we just about got out to Vesta. And we lost our second reaction wheel when we were leaving Vesta. We went down to low altitude and came back up and we completed our mapping and then headed out to Ceres ,but then we lost the second reaction wheel.

At that point we decided to save our remaining two reaction wheels and just use gas. We were out in space and we didn't have to maneuver an awful lot and we could reduce the number of times we turned the spacecraft to point to Earth, to send data to Earth. And then we limped along and got to Ceres, but then did a really good job at Ceres.

Eventually we used our remaining gas supply at Ceres with a very good experimental observational program. I'm really pleased with what we did at Ceres. Except that I did make some TV producers mad at me. And they wrote a letter to National Geographic saying that they had this program, “The Expanse.” And the producers have these people who are living inside Ceres on their series, and they have no water. So they have to go out and mine water and bring it back to Ceres. And you, the Dawn mission, go to Ceres and you find all that water with Dawn. We spoiled their premise!

Behrman:

[Laughs]

Russell:

So I made some producers mad at me, but otherwise I think the Ceres part of the mission went extremely well and I'm really pleased with how we managed to do that. So we really got a lot out of the Dawn mission, much more than I had initially expected, and I would have been happy at one time with just being able to do the Vesta part of the mission.

The story I do like to tell, though, is that we saved NASA a billion dollars by doing that mission. Although we spent a half billion dollars, we managed to save NASA a billion dollars because eventually they would have had to do the mission and go to both Vesta and Ceres. But if they hadn't had our proposal to do it with solar electric propulsion, they would have had to make much bigger rockets to launch the spacecraft and operate it. Each of those other missions we priced at seven hundred and fifty million dollars. You have to do it twice; you end up with one point five billion. And we only used point five billion. So we really did save NASA a lot of money.

Behrman:

[Laughs] Have they...

Russell:

I don't even know if they're appreciative of that fact.

Behrman:

Yeah, that's the question, I think, if they decide to support more missions that can similarly save them money in that manner?

Russell:

Well, what they haven't done yet, but they should have done, is launch more solar electric propulsion missions. I think we will find, in the future, that NASA will, but no one's come along and repeated what we did. And they really should. There's a lot of other targets out there that can be addressed in exactly the same way. And they do make better missions, better engines, et cetera, with time. So I think you could even do more than we did with some new missions. But for some reason, what we did thus far is unique.

Behrman:

What are some other targets that you think would be good for new solar electric propulsion methods?

Russell:

Well, there are other large asteroids out there. Well, in fact, I shouldn't say no one has, because, in fact, the Psyche mission, which has not been launched yet, did pattern itself after Dawn and is going to the asteroid 16 Psyche, which was, at one time and perhaps not so much now, thought to be an iron body. It might have a lot of iron in it, but it's not as simple as was once thought.

But the Psyche mission is going to be launched in probably two years from now, and then will take a few years to get out to Psyche. We will get another ion propulsion mission. It's not out of the factory as of this writing. It's still being put together. But I think it will be launched in 2022, except for one possible thing that could go wrong. And that is the virus. Thus far, the Psyche team are moving full speed ahead.

Behrman:

Ah, yes.

Russell:

And I do expect that sometime this coronavirus thing will end and we will get back to normal, but it won't be done on the scale that we're all hoping

Behrman:

Right.

Russell:

I think that probably gets me through my science programs, except some medals and press, but we don't have to worry about those things. What more did you want to learn from me?

Behrman:

Well, I do have a couple more questions. I was interested actually in some of the history of space physics at UCLA because it seems as though there's been a very vibrant scientific research program there and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the history of that, some of the people involved there.

Russell:

OK. I think, you know, science and history are full of people who think they would really like to do something and then end up drifting away from what they did. So we have some people, I've mentioned Professor Holzer along the way, and he got together with Ed Smith and did the OGO series of search coil investigations, as we call them. They just measured the time varying magnetic field. And that gave UCLA a very good start. That was before they had made the Department of Earth and Space Science that they have now. But there was a geology department and there were geophysicists in the Institute of Geophysics.

The Institute of Geophysics was a multi-campus institute. There was a branch at La Jolla in San Diego, and there was a branch at Riverside, there was a branch at UCLA. There was not a branch at Berkeley, but there were scientists at Berkeley in their Space Science Institute with whom we worked, so there was the equivalent of a UC-funded institute. And then there were some smaller ones at Riverside, and also Santa Cruz. So we had an Institute that was devoted to science and not teaching that was spread through the university. Probably not all of the campuses, but a number of the major campuses, had this institute and were doing space science in part. And so that helped us out at UCLA. And eventually near the end of the institute, I became the system-wide director.

But we had a number of system-wide directors in between from the time I was a student and the time I rose to the top. At UCLA, it resulted in an emphasis, not uniquely or solely, but a good, strong emphasis on space so we did develop a good program. And eventually the Department of Earth and Space Science hired a number of people who also could contribute to the space endeavor. We did trade engineers and stories and stuff like that, but basically the groups were independent on the inside. Not that we fought; we didn't battle each other. We were friends. But each group developed their own particular area and Dave Paige was one of them who did similar work but not in the Institute. And there was allied work in terms of lunar sample analysis and similar work that went on.

And that was enough to have a critical mass of people who were interested in the planets and the sun and the geophysics of the earth's magnetosphere. So we did develop. Now Richard Libby was a prime person in the early days as a Nobel laureate and the director of the IGPP at UCLA. But, he really didn't advance things as much as one might have hoped.

And we went through a number of institute directors who helped expand our interest in different directions. But, the space physics group sort of migrated from Professor Holzer to Paul Coleman, who, you know, who hired me, and we put together a number of missions that used the magnetometer. Around the moon was one and then going to Venus, which I headed, and the dual spacecraft around the Earth that we've talked about.

But Paul Coleman then got interested in administration. And, eventually, Holzer drifted away and into university administration. Coleman drifted away into organizations outside of UCLA. He was involved in the University Space Research Association and other activities. And so he wasn't around UCLA all that much in the end. He just went off in other directions.

So it was really usually the younger group, even though we had experienced prizewinning older people. The strength of UCLA in those days really depended on hiring new people and younger people. And, so, I'm probably not a good example of being an old person who's still active, but, most people, as their careers proceeded, evolved into doing different things. So that's my take on sort of the history of the developments in space: that in general, they went to younger people who joined the faculty and they took over the baton and ran with it.

Behrman:

Who do you think influenced your research or your development as a scientist?

Russell:

You asked that question in the notes you sent around, and that's a really difficult one because there were a number of people who influenced me. Fred Scarf, who had an instrument, a small instrument on Pioneer Venus and with whom I spent a fair amount of time, probably was the most influential. Ed Smith, I worked with him, but I don't feel that I got as much out of that relationship as I did with Fred Scarf. Fred died in Moscow on a trip on which we were both traveling, and that sort of left me adrift. And from that time, I don't think anybody really mentored me after that. But I've worked with a large number of people, including many students, and enjoyed what I got from those people.

One thing I think I should mention is, in the development of the Dawn program, I started off by putting all of the smart females that I knew on the team, which was probably about three, because there weren't that many women in the field at that point. But when I got to pick people for the final team, I was able to find a number of younger women and in that we were really successful. I think by my count, we got it up to 30 percent of female investigators. And then when we got graduate students involved, then we even did better than that. And I feel, but I'm male, that there was never a real woman problem or man-woman problem on the mission because we had a large enough number that the women on the team did not feel like a small minority.

There was always someone there for them to talk to. There were always other women in the room, and they seldom found they were the sole women on anything. There was always another woman on that committee. I don't think I should be the judge of that, but we have tried to do it right from the beginning, and I think I was successful.

Behrman:

Right. On that same subject, you mentioned in another interview that your mother had actually wanted to be a scientist and your wife is also a scientist. Could you talk a little bit about that and how that maybe affected you and your work?

Russell:

Well, it probably affected me a lot, even though my mother seldom told the story about not being able to go to a regular high school, but to a secretarial school. I think the important thing was I married a scientist and we followed a dual career. And I think she did well, although, she didn't, for whatever reason, make it on the regular tenured faculty. She does have tenure, and that was given to her out of the respect of the department. But she didn't get quite as far as I would have hoped that she did. She's still working. She's teaching up to 500 students at a time over Zoom, during the coronavirus problem. She has had to revise her classes entirely to fit on the web and then teach students remotely.

And that has been quite strange, let me tell you. But she has managed to do it thus far and made it through the first half of the class. Now the next lecture is the midterm so she's done well.

My daughters are both PhDs. They both have PhDs in science and they have drifted a little bit. My oldest daughter eventually went into the consulting business and then became an executive at the Blizzard Corporation, which is a gaming company. So she uses her training to be able to think logically but she is a middle level manager. And my younger daughter got her Ph.D. and went into engineering. She got her Ph.D. in an engineering field at Berkeley and then went into the industry and worked on LEDs, light emitting diodes, for a number of years, rising to the top of a small company. But recently, as the company shrank, she decided to resign. And, right now, she's semi-retired. But I'm thinking that she will eventually go back into industry and work.

So I've been surrounded by PhDs. I'm pretty sure that at least two of my grandchildren will get PhDs. I don’t attribute this to my influence. I've got a family of smart people, that’s all.

Behrman:

You must be very proud.

Russell:

Really proud. They all have talents and some of the time I can see talents that were in the family in ancestors coming through that had not been manifested in my generation, such as art. These traits disappear in the intervening generations and then suddenly come out. It is neat suddenly to see art bloom in a particular generation and then maybe in another generation, or some other skill that's related to art will bloom and you can say, hey, I can see that gene popping out.

Behrman:

Yes, absolutely. I do have another question, which is perhaps a bit out of left field. But when I was reading up on some previous interviews you did, I noticed you mentioned you read a lot of science fiction when you were younger.

Russell:

Yes. Now I write it.

Behrman:

Oh, you do?

Russell:

No, no I don't. That was a joke. [Laughs]

Of course, in a competitive area, you know that people are claiming that what you've done is not correct. I think I'm pretty pleased with the correctness of what I wrote.

Yes, I did read a lot of science fiction, and I think I stopped reading science fiction when I had a lot of real science to do. So when reading actual science was essential for my success and understanding of what I was doing then I spent the time in reading the science journals.

Behrman:

Right. Did you have any favorite books or authors?

Russell:

I probably did when I was young, and I probably ran through most of what certain authors wrote, but I'm not 100 percent sure now about which authors wrote which books that I read. So I'm not going to guess at them. If they were mentioned in those earlier stories, they're probably correct. I don't want to make a mistake now.

Behrman:

That's quite all right. Is there anything we haven't covered that you would perhaps like to talk about?

Russell:

No, I don't think there's anything that we need to... I think you got a good sketch of what I am and what I've done. And so I think that you've got all the details you probably need. I'm sure there are things in the literature on me, but I think that most of the literature is my science output. I've done a fair amount of writing and I've authored and co-authored over two thousand papers that have been referenced about 70,000 times, at present.

Behrman:

So, speaking of writing output, though, I did mean to ask you about your textbook.

Russell:

OK, but you know, there have been two.

Behrman:

Oh. But then I'm missing one.

Russell:

And the first one was with Margaret Kivelson. And what we did was sort of cheating. But what we did at the time is to bring together a set of people to give symposia on different aspects of space science. And then we put a book together that we put a lot of work into, but that other people had contributed chapters to so that we had a fairly complete book. We called that Introduction to Space Physics.

And then we decided, or I decided, that we needed to write a textbook that was really a textbook, and so in the 90s I started writing a complete textbook. And so that's the one that you're probably familiar with. So we started off with the history of the field and then sort of the space physics that affects the Earth and then go out in the planets and in the interplanetary regions and then and put in the mathematics that is necessary for the field as well as the physical principles. And that's done, I think, fairly well but it hasn't quite sold out the first printing, though, yet. But in this age of the Internet, there are a lot of sources that compete and a lot of things that you can get on the Internet so I'm not expecting books to sell quite as many copies anymore as they used to.

But I think that we're almost through the first printing, which I don't remember whether it was two or three thousand, but it was in that area somewhere. But they may print it again. And I've gone through and found what I thought were all the typos. The next book should be better.

Behrman:

Well, it's inevitable that you only find all the typos after it's already been published.

Russell:

Yes, well, when it's published, it's the only time you have to really read it carefully.

Behrman:

[Laughs] Yes. It's almost too bad you can't do the same with satellites anymore.

Russell:

I guess one thing that surprised me about my career, that was announced in an article by Nature in August 1998, a year and a half ago... And somebody did a study on collaboration, and he never really revealed how he calculated collaboration. But I don't know whether it was the amount of email traffic or whether it was the number of citations you got in the literature or whatever he did. Or coauthors you had. Anyways, I was named the number one collaborator in the area of planetary science and physical science. And I don't know why they put those two categories together. But when you put those two categories together, I came out on top. I'm not the most collaborative person in the world. Someone beat me there. But I did come out number one in planets and physical science. I think that is one of the things that holds me back the most is that I do get a lot of e-mail and so I do interact with people a lot.

Behrman:

I imagine you must have sat on a great deal of committees and boards as well.

Russell:

The answer is mixed there. I did when I was young but I really had a great career of bouncing from committee to committee, both in the science scene internationally and in the domestic scene on science boards and things. What happened was I became so successful with my projects that I was spending all my sort of time that you might devote to these other things on building spacecraft and analyzing data and stuff so the boards and things eventually became my own.

There were things that I was leading, and I didn't have time for those other things. I would get invited to be on selection committees for grants or missions and stuff like that. But eventually I just had to turn things like that down because I was too committed to the things that I was leading. I really got over successful. You don't want to go there, it's actually difficult.

Behrman:

[Laughs] Ah, it's such a problem to have to be over successful.

Russell:

Well. [Laughs] It does put a limitation on what you can achieve. It happened and I did a lot of good things. Hopefully didn't do too many bad things, and I think the world is a little bit better for it. And we have about fifty good graduate students trained on our programs. And so we made a contribution to the staffing of the space science community and we've made contributions to the teaching of science and we've made contributions to getting missions out into space and data returned to Earth. So I was happy to do what I did. It was never boring.

Behrman:

Well, that's a very nice sentiment. Is there anything else you'd like to say in conclusion to wrap up?

Russell:

No, I'm just grateful to all the people with whom I've worked who really enabled me to do all these things. Doing space science is a group effort. Building a mission, developing your mission, and then working on a mission is just work of groups of people. And I was able to work with a large number of groups, and groups that were really very good. And that helped me. I could never have done what I did alone.

Behrman:

Well, thank you very much for speaking with me. This has been, I'm Joanna Behrman. I've been talking with Dr. Christopher Russell over Zoom, which is a new way of doing oral history interviews, at least since the coronavirus. See, what else should I say? Oh, it's April 23, at about 11 o'clock Pacific time. Thanks very much. I'll stop the recording.