Loren Acton

Thompson:

This is Samantha Thompson. It is August 30, 2017. I am with Loren Acton at MSU campus in Bozeman, Montana. Thank you for joining me today.

Acton:

Thank you, Samantha.

Thompson:

Thank you. So, this project is centered around solar physics, heliophysics, but we’d like to get a sense of your whole career path. So, I’d love to start from your childhood if you could tell me a little bit about where you grew up, your parents, your family, what that environment was like for you.

Acton:

I was the last of six children, born to a rancher in central Montana. Spent my first six years of schooling in a little one-room school. In fact, sometimes I would ride my pony to school and turn him loose in the schoolyard during the day. Junior high and high school, I went to schools in Billings, Montana and found out that I had a reasonable competence in math and a great interest in how everything worked from a scientific and mechanical perspective.

So, when I was still in high school, I decided that I was going to become a mechanical engineer and was going to do my undergraduate work here at Montana State College. (It was College in those days.) On my way to matriculate in Montana, I stopped and visited my oldest brother, Winston Acton, who had graduated under the GI Bill in electrical engineering. He asked me what I was going to study, and I told him I was going to take mechanical engineering. He thought a minute and then he said, “Why don’t you take physics? It’s harder. Take the hardest thing you can find. You can always change out if you don’t like it, but give it a try.” I hadn’t given a thought to taking physics up to that point, but I took his advice. Signed up in the engineering physics program here at Montana State and because of that one little conversation I got started on the science track instead of the engineering track.

Thompson:

Interesting.

Acton:

Well, it turns out that in my work I am an experimentalist, so I did a lot of engineering anyway, and the degree in engineering physics was a really good background for me. As it came time to graduate, the question is where are you going to go to graduate school, because most of the people in engineering physics from Montana in those days went to graduate school. The popular thing to do—this was in 1959—was to go into reactor physics, and a lot of my colleagues did that. For some reason… well, mainly because I worked one summer at the National Reactor Testing Station in Arco, Idaho at the Engineering Test Reactor Critical Facility, I wanted something a little closer to nature, and there was a professor here at Montana State by the name of Charlie Bradley who was a geologist and just a wonderful mentor. He was the one that suggested geophysics. Well, when he suggested it, I thought geophysics meant the solid Earth, and I knew that I wasn’t going to do that because I had taken a course in mineralogy and since I’m color blind, identifying minerals is really hard. [laughing]

Thompson:

I understand!

Acton:

But it turns out that geophysics means a lot more. It’s the whole science of the Earth and its surrounding and its atmosphere and its interaction with the Sun. So, that appealed to me, but I had no background in it. But I saw a little 3×5 card on a bulletin board in the Physics Department announcing a graduate fellowship from the university Committee on Atmospheric Research for $5,000 a year plus all your tuition and everything. That was really big money in those days! By that time, I was married and had one child, so this seemed really appealing. But I didn’t have any of the knowledge necessary to make a good application for that. But one of the professors in the department, Kurt Rothschild, volunteered to run a seminar course on atmospheric physics, solar physics, and Sun-Earth relations. I learned enough in that course so that I could write a good application and I won that fellowship and went to the University of Colorado where that kind of work was just taking off. The space program was just about to burst forth with opportunities for scientists to fly their experiments in space, so I was at the right place at the right time. There was a fellow by the name of Walter Orr Roberts who was leading the charge on what we called Sun-Earth relations that later become astrogeophysics. Explain that to your mother-in-law. [laughter]

Thompson:

Yeah!

Acton:

So, I got involved with that group at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and it was just a terrific time of learning and meeting a lot of the leaders in the field because they would come through Boulder for their summer vacations. I need to stop a minute. [break]

These leaders would come through Boulder on summer vacations or during the academic year, and I got to meet James Van Allen and Harlow Shapley and Chandrasekhar and any number of the people that were really at the cutting edge of this new opportunity to find out what you could find by putting your instruments in space. So, by the time I graduated, which was in 1959—or no, 1964—I already had a NASA contract to fly a solar x-ray experiment on a rocket.

Thompson:

You applied for that while you were in grad school?

Acton:

While I was still in grad school.

Thompson:

Who led you… were you the PI on it or did you have somebody…?

Acton:

Yes, I was PI. By that time… I did my last year as a graduate student working for the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory as a grad studies scientist. My thesis advisor, Harold Zirin, had already moved to Caltech, and so I went to Palo Alto and we sort of did this over the road. I wrote my thesis at Lockheed, and so I was able to send in this proposal from my job at Lockheed and got an opportunity to fly this rocket.

Thompson:

That’s fantastic!

Acton:

It was an amazing revelation to me when I learned as a graduate student that the US government and the taxpayers would give me money to carry out experiments just to follow my curiosity. I thought, “Wow! This is a great way to make a living!” and so I’ve been doing it now for many, many, many, many years. But that was the start.

Thompson:

That’s fantastic. Of all the people you encountered while you were at Boulder, did any take a particular interest in you and help motivate you through grad school?

Acton:

Well, I was especially fortunate in that I went to Boulder, matriculated in the department of physics. Wasn’t there very long until I found out about this department of astrogeophysics, which was a little bitty department which had its headquarters in a World War I temporary building behind the heating plant. There were about the same number of professor-researchers as there were grad students, and so I really had immediate access to people that were doing this work. I can mention Grant Athay and Harold Zirin, Walt Roberts. There were a number of professors—none in particular, but all together that were… If you worked under those people, you just began to believe that you could do this kind of work.

Thompson:

That’s fantastic. I want to pause there and go back in time a little bit because you ended up building instruments. When you were a kid, were you a tinkerer? Did you pull things apart? Did you try to build things?

Acton:

Oh, terrible.

Thompson:

Or was there just… [laughs]

Acton:

Terrible much. You have put your finger on it. There wasn’t anything that I didn’t take apart to see what it was like inside. [laughter] That stood me well as an experimentalist because you’re always building something that has never been done before, and so curiosity and enthusiasm will take you a long way. Actually, that’s why I decided to be a mechanical engineer—because I really enjoyed tinkering and taking things apart and understanding how my little two-cycle engine worked that ran my little motorcycle. But that’s also a good background for somebody that goes into science, if you’re curious about everything.

Thompson:

Curious. Yeah. How did your family feel about that? Were they supportive? Was that a headache?

Acton:

Oh, my dad once suggested that maybe I’d like to be a meteorologist. I was in high school, and I didn’t realize that a meteorologist had to do with the weather. I thought it was somebody that studied meteors. [laughs] That’s how naïve I was. But the family was supportive. My mom passed away early on when I was 11 years old, and my dad believed in giving his kids a lot of rope and a lot of slack.

Thompson:

Awesome.

Acton:

And sure, they were excited. When I was selected for flight on the Spacelab 2 mission, my dad was in his nineties and he really thought that was great. He says, “Loren, I feel like I’m right on the cutting edge!” [laughter]

Thompson:

When you were a kid, had you imagined anything that grand that would be in your future?

Acton:

Oh, no. Certainly not.

Thompson:

Did you think you would leave Montana?

Acton:

Never really gave it a moment’s thought. It’s what you did. I knew… My dad was a rancher, as I mentioned, and being the last of six, by the time I was going into junior high he had sold the ranch. So, ranching never got in my blood, and I always figured that I would be doing something in the technical side or scientific side.

Thompson:

So, back at Colorado, were you a teaching assistant at all? Did you encounter teaching while you were there?

Acton:

No. I had a full ride with that UCAR fellowship.

Thompson:

Okay, nice. That doesn’t happen nowadays. [laughs]

Acton:

We were doing well. I just feel so bad for the young folks that go through college now and seem to have no option but to acquire enormous debt. I mean going to college, you could earn enough in the summer when I was an undergraduate to go to college all year. It was so inexpensive to get your education compared to what you could earn in a summer job. I feel really bad that things have changed in the way they have so that following your dream on the academic side takes a lot of courage and sacrifice that I didn’t have to face.

Thompson:

Yeah. Well, be grateful. I’m glad you’re grateful that you got through it.

Acton:

Well, the important thing is to be born at the right time. You know, I was born when the space program was just taking off and all these new opportunities were out there.

Thompson:

Yeah, and with a field like astrogeophysics… [laughs] Did you have a sense for what field you actually belonged to? Was there a community that you felt like you belonged to?

Acton:

Well, the department at Boulder had experts in atmospheric physics, physics of the upper atmosphere, and how the solar radiation impacted it. But we also had a lot of people whose primary interest was the Sun itself, and I kind of gravitated that direction. So, at the time that it was possible for the first time to fly instruments to study the Sun at wavelengths that had heretofore been inaccessible, I was right there ready to take part in that. So, I am really more of a solar astronomer than anything else.

Thompson:

Okay. Interesting. I just lost my train of thought. Did you go to conferences while you were a grad student?

Acton:

I did. I actually published a paper or two. I worked in summers at what is now the NOAA lab—I forget what it was called in those days—in Boulder for a woman named Connie Warwick. She was interested in the shortwave fadeouts that are caused for shortwave radio transmissions because of ionization produced in the low atmosphere by solar flares. It wasn’t understood whether this was because of Lyman-alpha emission or x-ray emission. Both of them deposited energy and caused ionization in the D layer of the atmosphere that absorbed the shortwave radio waves. So, that was my first research project as a grad student was to try to figure this out. Of course, the answer came readily as soon as we could fly instruments…

Thompson:

I imagine.

Acton:

…and detect that it was the x-rays and not the Lyman-alpha that was causing the ionization that caused the shortwave fadeouts.

Thompson:

Is that what led you to your thesis then?

Acton:

Yes, it did. By the time I was writing my thesis, there had been a few rockets flown by the US Naval Research Laboratory, and there had been one spacecraft put up by the British that had made a few measurements of solar x-rays. The Naval Research Lab was launching satellites with ionization chambers on board that could measure solar x-rays, and so there were a few measurements. The instruments were better than the telemetry systems in those days, and so you could only gather data during your real-time pass over a ground station, and so you got little snippets.

But I was fortunate to get well acquainted with the Naval Research Lab people, and particularly a gentleman by the name of Bob Kreplin, who was one of the early scientists in this area. Of course, they didn’t have grad students to analyze their data since they weren’t a university, so I got to go back to the Naval Research Lab and the data from the third of these solar radiation satellites—we called them SolRADs—was my data for science! So, we moved my wife and baby—by that time two babies—back to Oxon Hill, Maryland, and I went to work at the Naval Research Lab to await the launch of my satellite, which was SolRAD IV, not SolRAD III. SolRAD III had been a semi-failure because it had not separated from the satellite called Injun 1 from James Van Allen’s group, and so instead of being a spinning satellite which made the data easy to analyze, it was a tumbling satellite and you got a glimpse of the Sun only from time to time at an unknown orientation. So, those data had never really been used.

Well, I’m telling you this story because when they launched SolRAD IV, my satellite, it fell in Cuba. [laughs] They launched the backup and it fell in the Pacific Ocean, so SolRAD IV never happened. So, I managed to squeeze a thesis out of this limited data from SolRAD III and the British instrument.

Thompson:

How long were you in Maryland for?

Acton:

A year, and then we moved back to Colorado and I finished my thesis there.

Thompson:

Okay. How did you find out about the job, the grad study program at Lockheed? Do you remember that?

Acton:

It turned out, for family reasons, before I was done with my dissertation, that we needed to move to California. My brother was a Methodist minister there, and the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory had a lot of folks doing this kind of work. By that time, I was pretty well acquainted with the community of scientists, and so I would go to the seminars and colloquia at the Lockheed Research Lab. It wasn’t very long until I was hired, and that’s where I stayed for 29 years. [laughs]

Thompson:

What were your responsibilities when you first showed up?

Acton:

Initially my responsibilities… I worked for a gentleman by the name of Phil Fisher, Philip Fisher, who was a pioneer in x-ray astronomy. He was flying rocket experiments looking for x-rays from stars, and I found it really interesting. If the universe had been slightly different, it might have been Phil Fisher that won the Nobel Prize instead of Riccardo Giacconi because they were in competition. [laughs] But anyway, I worked for him and would help analyze the data from his rockets, and then on a part-time basis I worked on my thesis. So, within a year I had finished, come back to Boulder, and took my orals and had the doctorate, had the union card.

Thompson:

And then you immediately went back to Palo Alto?

Acton:

I just stayed there. The Lockheed Research Labs, particularly in those days, was a wonderful place to work if you were an experimentalist, because as long as you brought in a significant fraction of your own funding (which I could do from NASA), you had all these really brilliant engineers to help you design your rockets and experiments and things.

Thompson:

So, it was a good community? People were willing to help out each other?

Acton:

Oh, yeah.

Thompson:

Was it a large group at that time?

Acton:

Well, Phil Fisher was sort of the leader, and I suppose there were, maybe all told, eight or ten of us that were doing different aspects of this kind of work. I learned so much because I knew nothing, you know. [laughs] But I learn fast.

Thompson:

That’s good. So, I’m going to need your help getting the chronology of this because you worked on a lot of different missions, and then you had Spacelab. What project came first? Do you remember?

Acton:

Well, my very first project flew on an Aerobee-Hi rocket. It was an experiment to measure the high-energy end of the solar x-ray spectrum, and so I designed and built with my own hands very large proportional counters. I had four of those looking out the one side of this spinning rocket, so it gave me a lot of sensitive area. The idea was to see how much high-energy activity there was in the Sun when there isn’t a flare. You know, what was the high-energy end of the spectrum like at x-ray wavelengths? How high were the temperatures in solar active regions which surround the sunspots? So, that rocket and subsequent rockets in that series gave us quite a little knowledge about that. I went from proportional counters to Bragg crystal spectrometers so that I could actually get a spectrum of the radiation coming from the active regions. The next step was to put collimators in front of the spectrometers so that I could see where on the Sun the emission was coming from, and in those days that was all new stuff. You know, you could just fly almost anything and you’d learn something new.

Thompson:

Was it hard to get pieces machined? Were you doing that yourself or did you have a machine…?

Acton:

No, because it was a lab. The Lockheed Palo Alto Research Labs had a really good research machine shop, so I could go down and talk to the machinists and dream and draw up things and so on. We were basically able to do everything in-house.

Thompson:

Wonderful.

Acton:

We built our own detectors, and it was an ideal situation for an experimentalist. I had, of course, intended to go to a university, which is what you did: you got your doctorate and then you became a professor. But because of this little detour to Lockheed, I ended up not doing that until 1993, when I came to Montana.

Thompson:

But you got a lot done in that detour!

Acton:

Oh, it was great. It was a wonderful place to live, and many of us that worked together still get together once a year for fun. I need coffee. [Break]

Thompson:

All right. What was your next project after the Aerobee?

Acton:

Well, one thing led to another, and I guess it was in 1967 or something. I was approached by NASA Solar Physics Office asking if I could accommodate an instrument from a lab in Germany on one of my rockets. This was an XUV spectrograph, and it was produced by the [Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM]. A guy named Gerhard Schmidtke was the PI, and I said, “Sure. We can work that in.” Well, that led to—after we had a successful flight—to the opportunity to spend a year in Germany at Freiburg in that lab, which was really good for the family and good for me and gave me a chance to write some papers, plan some new instruments.

But eventually the opportunity came along to fly on satellites. I’d been flying rocket experiments of increasing sophistication as the years went on, so I proposed an experiment for Orbiting Solar Observatory 8. Now you may remember that the OSO satellite series was a spinning part and a pointed part. So, the spinning part provided gyroscopic stability and the pointed part was driven against it so it could keep pointed at the Sun. It was a very, very productive series of solar observations.

So, it came time to apply for the new series. I proposed a set of proportional counters behind fine collimators in the spinning part that had the collimators oriented at 60-degree angles with respect to one another, so that they crossed the Sun with a fields of view north-south, and +/- 60 degrees from north-south. So, by the timing of the signals you could see—coarsely, not really finely—where on the Sun the emission was coming from. Up to that time we had very little understanding of the relationship between the properties of a solar active region and its output in terms of these short-wavelength radiations that were important to the Earth’s atmosphere. So, it was helpful to get better information on that particular factor.

That experiment was successful on OSO-8, but it never changed the field a lot, because about the same time the Skylab missions happened. If you recall, the Skylab missions had a couple of focusing x-ray telescopes on board. Well, their angular resolution was so much better than I could achieve that my data were sort of not competitive. [laughs] So, it’s a matter of timing. If I’d have been a year earlier, it would have been a great experiment. As it was, it was a so-so experiment. But that was my first experiment on a spacecraft, was on OSO-8.

We continued to build and fly rocket experiments trying to learn about the physical properties of the active parts of the Sun, and the opportunity was coming along to use the space shuttle as an observational platform. This was in the ’70s. By that time, I was part of the community and so I ended up on the committees to help decide how to use the space shuttle for science, and in particular, for solar science.

After one of these [NASA-organized] conferences, it soaked in that they were talking about flying people like me on the shuttle—you know, just ordinary Joes. I thought that would be really neat because I love adventures, and so I began to focus on being part of the experiment teams that would fly instruments on the shuttle and maybe I could go along as a payload specialist.

To make a long story short, in 1978 our experiment with the Lockheed Research Labs under the PI-ship of a guy named Alan Title was selected. The acronym was SOUP (Solar Optical Universal Polarimeter). SOUP was a 10-inch reflector with very, very good optics, and by getting it above the atmosphere, every image would be perfect. There would be no atmospheric distortion, and that could, in principle, be very helpful, because when you’re looking for subtle effects such as the movement of features in the Sun’s atmosphere, being able to make a movie where there were no atmospheric effects really was very helpful. So, I was chosen as a payload specialist to fly with SOUP. Chosen in 1978; we finally got off the ground in 1985.

Thompson:

Did anyone else from your group want to go? Did they all decide that you were going to be the one that represented, or did it just make more sense that it would be you?

Acton:

Well, I was one of the co-investigators, and one Friday night over a beer I said, “You know, I’d like to fly on that thing if we win.” [laughs] It turned out that there was another scientist by the name of George Simon that was involved in the experiment whose name was put in as a payload specialist. We had… Well, backing up, when the experimenters working group met for the Spacelab 2 mission, NASA had not yet written the rules for how you select a payload specialist, and so they turned it over to our experimenters working group, since it was the first one formed, and said, “Give us the names of some people that would be candidates for being payload specialists.” I volunteered to write the requirements document for that. [laughs] So, in the end, it was decided that really the solar experiments on Spacelab 2 were the ones that could profit the most from an onboard scientific expertise, and so the solar investigators were invited to put forward the names of candidates. So, ten names were put forward. We took physicals. One guy dropped out, one guy couldn’t pass physicals, so that meant there were eight. Out of eight, four were selected, and out of those four, two were selected for a first flight. So, the competition was not 1 in 10,000 like to be a real astronaut. Pretty small.

Thompson:

But still. Did you have to go through a training the same with the normal astronaut class?

Acton:

The primary training… I didn’t learn to fly a jet airplane, unfortunately. The primary training had to do with operating the scientific instruments, and that was a lot of fun because we had science all the way from blood draw, studying vitamin D metabolites, to plant growth to chemical composition of high-energy cosmic rays, to infrared telescopes, to cosmic x-ray telescopes. We had 13 different experiments on board, and so I had the privilege of learning enough about the science of each of these different experiments to be a useful servant of all. However, our primary job was running the solar telescopes, and there were two of us which flew as payload specialists. We had a round-the-clock 24/7 operation, broke into two teams, a red team and a blue team. When the Sun came up, the job was to get things pointed at the Sun and kick off the solar telescopes; 50 minutes later the Sun went down and then all the nighttime telescopes went to work. It was a really fun mission.

Thompson:

Yeah! That’s a lot of work, a lot going on!

Acton:

Yeah, a lot of detail. We had a fine team. The career astronauts were all interested in science. In fact, I think we had more PhDs on that crew than any other up to that point.

Thompson:

While you were on the shuttle, did you have a sense of being on the shuttle, of kind of being amazing, or were you just kind of nose-deep into work?

Acton:

Well, you know, you’re one of the first persons that had enough insight to even ask that question, and the answer is that for about the first half of the mission, I could have just as well been working in the physics basement.

Thompson:

Really.

Acton:

You know, I was so focused. I overdosed on responsibility, and it took a while to actually decide to look out the window and to experience space flight. My colleague Karl Henize, who was my partner on the red team, he was a mission specialist and he’d been waiting 17 years to get his flight. He said, “Loren, look out the window! You’re in space!” [laughs] At that point, I really tried to experience it, and the neatest thing—two neat things. One is weightlessness was just ever so much fun, and the other is just the view. You know, this is a gorgeous planet, just a gorgeous planet, and having a scientific background in astrogeophysics really helped me appreciate what I was seeing. You could see the airglow layer, which I had studied, and the layer of the atmosphere where the chemical reactions excited by the solar ultraviolet radiation produces a glow. Of course, you can’t see it in the daytime. Special times you can see it at night from mountains, but I could look out horizontally and I could see the airglow in the daytime! It was just so special. And to see the aurora… we didn’t see the aurora borealis, but we saw the aurora australis—had some really fascinating auroras. To be able to look down and see the lightning storms! I had no idea how dominant a process atmospheric electricity is until you see these lightning storms from above, because most of the strokes are from cloud to cloud, not cloud to ground. So, flying over someplace like the Amazon… You know, it was Fourth of July for thousands of square miles. It was just great!

Thompson:

That’s fantastic! So, it was eight days of pure work. Did you get the results, the data that you wanted while you were up?

Acton:

Oh, man! You know, it was a cliff-hanger for SOUP, our instrument. It was not my shift when SOUP was turned on. It was turned on and it worked for something like eight hours and then shut itself down and would not accept turn-on commands. So, after a few days the crew just didn’t pay any more attention to it and went on to other things. But the folks on the ground, every time they had access, would send turn-on commands. We fired the orbital maneuvering engines over Maui for a different experiment, and this caused a little acceleration and must have moved the tiny particle that was shorting out something in some microcircuit, and it took a turn-on command. It turned on after four days. So, they commanded it from the ground so that it could not turn itself off, and so we had four days of good observations with that instrument.

The primary tunable birefringent filter, which was used to observe these iron lines that let us track the Zeeman effect—that had some problems. But the backup system was a very simple telescope taking pictures on film through various filters, and that was working fine. So, even though the prime experiment wasn’t good, the backup was going to be great.

The instruments all were running hot. You know, temperature control in space is a tricky business, and so the instruments were running hotter on the solar platform than they should have been. So, when they set out to develop the film from our mission—and it was a special Kodak film with very, very fine grain so that it could record very high-resolution images. Up at Sacramento Peak Observatory they knew how to process film, so they were part of the team that were going to process the film. They clipped off a piece and developed it and it was perfectly clear, not a sign of an image. The film had been subjected to something called reciprocity failure where an image will fade away. Most films have some problem with this, but the special kind we had had special problems. Plus, the instrument was hotter than it was supposed to be, and that makes reciprocity failure worse.

Well, what they did, they experimented with pieces of film and then developed the rest of the film with pure hot developer, and that brought out the images. So, we were able to pull the images out and they were very, very useful in understanding how the gas flows on the photosphere of the Sun to move the magnetic fields around to create the patterns of granulation and supergranulation that we had seen from the ground but didn’t understand how they were created. So, it was a really good result, even though three out of four things failed. [laughter]

Thompson:

And that was eight years after you had originally developed the instrument, too?

Acton:

Well, the instrument… The mission was put together in 1978 and we flew in 1985.

Thompson:

So, in between that time, what were you working on?

Acton:

Well, it was a part-time job. I was one of the principal investigators on an instrument called the Mapping X-ray Polychrometer, which was comprised of two different instruments. It was a collaboration with Mullard Space Science Laboratory and the Appleton Lab in the UK, and the two instruments were a bent crystal Bragg spectrometer that operated at short wavelengths and looked at high-temperature emission x-ray lines; and the flat crystal spectrometer, which was a collimated scanning spectrometer with five crystals on a stack so that we could get simultaneous images in oxygen VIII, neon IX, sulfur… I forget all the lines now. I’d have to go look it up. But anyway, that was a pretty fancy experiment and that flew on the Solar Maximum Mission, which was a stabilized, solar-pointed mission that was launched, as I recall, in 1980.

So, my primary activity during the early part of the interval that I was a part-time payload specialist was on the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM). SMM was a really great success, and it would have been even more a success if we had had the computing power on the ground that we have now. I mean the computers we had to work with this pretty complicated data were, by today’s standards, so very primitive. So, if you’re working with images and spectra interleaved, it’s pretty hard to do with a pencil and paper. So, you had to work really hard on your returns, but the Solar Max Mission was very successful and one I’m really proud of. It was fun working with my British colleagues on that. So, during a lot of the preparations for Spacelab 2, I was busy doing solar physics another way.

Thompson:

I noticed looking at your articles you’ve published that you… You know, you’ve published both about the instrumentation and the science. When you presented at conferences, did you tend to do more one than the other? I’m trying to gauge what the interest was in the instrumentation at that time.

Acton:

Well, conferences… Well, there are conferences which are on instrumentation.

Thompson:

Right.

Acton:

And so those are fun. I participated in some of those, but mostly I went to the scientific meetings that were interested in the results. As a real scientist, I’m pretty much of a flop. I didn’t publish a lot. I’ve got a lot of publications, but I’m not first author on very many. I was always thinking about the next thing to build, you know, because what intrigues me the most about solar physics—it’s beautiful. It’s just wonderful to be able to see a good spectrum or a high-resolution image in almost any wavelength. It’s worth trying to get those just because they look nice. So, I have to say that that was a lot of the motivation. So, if I can do this better, what would it look like? What would be the differences? Thankfully, some of the experiments were good enough that other scientists turned the observations into real science, real results. I didn’t do near as much of that as I should have, and I don’t really know why I got away with it, but I did.

Thompson:

Building good instruments. When you were planning for new instruments, did you have input from scientists, from astronomers?

Acton:

Oh, yeah. You always talked it over with your friends. Generally, it’s a matter of, “Okay, I know something in this subfield, maybe more than other people, and what is possible?” [interruption]

Thompson:

All right. I’m trying to remember where we were at. [laughs] Was this still Solar Maximum Mission that we were talking about?

Acton:

Well, we were talking about the interval between when I was waiting to actually fly in space, and so my focus… We moved back to Maryland and I was working at Goddard Space Flight Center on this mission. It was really a wonderful experience. You may remember that the Solar Max Mission was the first satellite to be repaired in space, and so being part of the team that lobbied NASA and lobbied the Congress to authorize that repair mission was fun. It was fun, and the repair happened, and it was successful, so the mission was able to be much more successful than it otherwise would have been because the failures happened—I forget—a year or so after launch. It was able to be refurbished and operated for many years.

Thompson:

In that lobbying process, were you dealing mainly with NASA administrators or were you working with congressmen?

Acton:

Oh, Dick Canfield and I collaborated on this lobbying effort, and yes, we went and talked to staffers in Congress and NASA folks and the scientific community and wrote a white paper and the whole thing. I think NASA really wanted to do it, so probably it would have happened even if we hadn’t done all this, but they did. It was, you know, a pretty gutsy thing to do because the Solar Max Mission was never designed to be serviced in space, so it was pretty tricky.

Thompson:

To figure it out. So, were you guys leading that design of how actually to fix it?

Acton:

No, that was all done by the manned space flight people.

Thompson:

Gotcha.

Acton:

It was the politicking that we were involved in.

Thompson:

How was that experience generally, working within DC and within large government budget issues?

Acton:

Well, it was interesting. I’m glad I got to do it. One of the things that happened as a result of the Solar Max Mission is that we moved to Maryland, and my wife got a job working for Alan Cranston, who was our California senator. So, I learned a lot about how the legislative branch actually works on the scene, and that knowledge was very helpful when it came time to go and lobby Congress for the Solar Max repair mission.

Thompson:

So, how long were you in Maryland?

Acton:

I guess we moved back there in 1980, and so we were there about three, three-and-a-half years.

Thompson:

Okay. Your family was happy to pick up and move?

Acton:

Yeah. Well, our kids were grown up. Our son moved back with us for a while, but our kids were out of the nest by then, and so it was just Evelyn and I.

Thompson:

Gotcha.

Acton:

It was great. She really enjoyed her experience on the Hill and I really enjoyed my experience at Goddard.

Thompson:

Wonderful! Was it different? How was the environment different at Goddard compared to Lockheed?

Acton:

That’s interesting. The Lockheed group was sort of unique among industrial labs in that it operated very much like a university group. The Goddard setup had, on one side, a lot of restrictions, a lot of things that made it difficult to do the job. On the other hand, you had the resources of NASA which is wonderful. So, there maybe wasn’t as much difference between the two as you might have thought. Now, this was in the days before terrorism was discovered, and so coming and going both in Washington, DC around the capital and at Goddard Space Flight Center was a lot easier than it is today. But our group at Lockheed was a fine place to work and operated in many ways a lot like the places, like Goddard did. There are just a lot of competent people at Goddard and competent scientists having a chance to do their science. I have a lot of respect for the way it was managed.

Thompson:

Did you interact with upper management at NASA, at Goddard?

Acton:

Yeah.

Thompson:

Or at NASA Headquarters?

Acton:

Yeah. Particularly in the solar physics side of things, yes.

Thompson:

Did you ever think that you might want to move into administration or were you…?

Acton:

The only time I seriously thought about that was after the Spacelab 2 mission. You know, once you’ve flown in space, particularly if you’re the first guy in this big corporation that’s ever done it, you can… A lot of paths are open to you, and I decided I kind of like doing solar physics. [laughs] So, I never really considered trying to move up into administration and the bureaucratic stuff. And the thing that really made the big difference in my career… Well, the first thing was the Spacelab 2 mission, which makes you into a different person in the eyes of everyone else in the world. But the second one was the opportunity to put a soft x-ray telescope on the Yohkoh mission. That announcement of opportunity [AO] came out shortly after the Spacelab 2 flight, and it had my name written on it. I mean that is the… I told you before, but a big motivator for me is the beauty of the images, and to take an x-ray movie of the Sun with a high-resolution telescope was something that I always had dreamed how wonderful that would be. So, there was no question. When the opportunity came up, I was going to go for it.

Thompson:

Do you remember what year that proposal was, or the call for proposals?

Acton:

The AO came out in 1985, shortly after the Spacelab 2 mission, and I sent in the proposal in ’86 and was selected.

Thompson:

Right away.

Acton:

And launched in ’91.

Thompson:

Yeah, so a quick turnaround.

Acton:

Yeah.

Thompson:

Can you tell me more about the mission and your role?

Acton:

Oh, it’s an amazing mission. There’s an interesting comparison—and this is just my own observation—between how the Japanese and Americans work in deciding about missions. The Japanese seem to take forever to make a decision, and then when they make a decision, [claps hands] bang! They go for it, you know, and so it’s wonderful to be involved in the Japanese mission that’s been approved. On the US side, we talk about things and we talk about things and we sort of make decisions and it seems like it’s forever. So, there’s really quite a difference in the two approaches. But the opportunity to be involved in a relatively compact mission organization on the Japanese side with wonderful support on the US side was the high point of my scientific career. The first x-ray picture that came down was such an amazing thing. It actually worked! And it worked well! [laughs]

Thompson:

Fantastic. How was it working? Did you have colleagues that were in Japan working alongside on this program?

Acton:

That was in the days before the Internet was good enough to do remote control of satellite operations, and so it was an agreed responsibility of the US team to be present during satellite operations. So, we rented a couple of apartments over there in appropriate locations and we generally had at least two people, sometimes three, that were there doing mission operations and data analysis for the whole decade of the mission. That was wonderful. I love Japan and my wife would always go with me and had a good time.

Thompson:

Fantastic. Did you have time to actually explore the country?

Acton:

Oh, yeah.

Thompson:

It wasn’t like up in space where you were working and stuff? [laughter]

Acton:

Yeah. We took time, and we still go back to Japan now and then. Haven’t been there for a couple years.

Thompson:

Wonderful. Was your next major mission TRACE after that?

Acton:

Well, I was involved in TRACE as a co-investigator, so when I… But TRACE really was not my baby. That was Alan Title’s baby, and when I came to Montana in 1993, I was privileged to have some of TRACE come with me. So, during the early days of the Montana solar physics group, we had Yohkoh still operating, and TRACE shortly thereafter began operating. So, we had two active missions that we were involved in here at Montana State that really helped to get the solar group going. The university was very supportive to this initiative, so it’s been a great part of my career, and we’ve been back now to Montana for over 20 years, which is really hard for me to believe.

Thompson:

Is that the reason for coming to Montana State, was the idea of running this program, the solar physics program here?

Acton:

No. [laughs] The reason for coming back to Montana is that we wanted to come back to Montana while my wife’s mother was still alive, and the idea of tying it in with some kind of relationship with Montana State was a natural because I could come with my own funding. I didn’t need to cost the university anything. That worked out beautifully well, but it wasn’t the prime motivation to come to Montana. But it probably should have been. [laughs]

Thompson:

Dick Canfield, he came back here not long after you did. Was it because of you, because you had started this program?

Acton:

Yeah. I hadn’t worked with Canfield for years and I knew that he wasn’t terribly happy in Hawaii, and so I started working on him right away to see if he would like to come here and play science in Montana. Debbie [Mrs. Canfield] was very helpful, and so Dick came. [laughs] I had a postdoc by the name of David Alexander who right now is Houston. I hope he’s not having to swim to work. But David Alexander from Scotland was a very strong promoter of the group and was a delight to have around here. David is a theorist, but he’s just a wonderful leadership kind of guy, so he was important to the formation of the group. Piet Martens, who had been working for ESA, decided that he’d like to have a change, and so Piet came.

We really needed someone, however, who was a professor in the tenure track. I had been given a fellowship by the Japanese Department of Education and spent three months in Japan as a guest of the Japanese government and had a wonderful time. They gave me $25,000. Meantime, I was drawing my Lockheed salary, so it worked out really well. [laughs] So, I told NASA, “Okay, if you will let us create a professorship in the department of physics in solar physics, I’ll pay half the salary for two years.” To make a long story short, they agreed that that would work and we hired Dana Longcope, who is just so good. Then we had some more money for a postdoc, so we hired Charles Kankelborg and we hired Dave McKenzie and we hired Jiong Qiu, and you know, it’s a pretty decent group now. But you know, time is moving on. Canfield is retired. I’m retired. David McKenzie has gone to Huntsville, and so times are changing, but it’s still a wonderful place to work.

Thompson:

Did you still have NASA money coming in while you were here?

Acton:

I don’t now. During the Yohkoh mission, and during a good many years after Yohkoh mission, we received NASA money for working with those data and operating the mission. We’re still getting a little bit of money from TRACE. We’ve been involved in the current Hinode mission, and as a… David McKenzie was a co-investigator with Harvard-Smithsonian, so we have a little bit of that money coming in, and we’ve got some grants from… Charles Kankelborg has a rocket program. Dana Longcope has theory programs. So, yeah, we still depend a lot on NASA, but it’s getting harder and harder. The resources are really pretty tight.

Thompson:

Yeah, hopefully NASA money stays there.

Acton:

Well, I hope so.

Thompson:

You don’t have that option. Do you have a sense for what direction the program is heading? Do you see there being more specific parts of the Sun people are looking at or new areas that are getting looked at?

Acton:

Well, helioseismology has been really important. I’ve personally not had very much to do with that, although a lot of my friends and colleagues have had, but we’ve learned a lot about what goes on inside the Sun and that’s important to understand because we’re still trying to puzzle out why the solar cycle is the way it is. I think the availability of the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope [the Daniel Inouye Solar Telescope on Maui], which I think will have first light next year and be operational in 2019, I think will be very, very important because the physical processes that go on in the release of energy in the solar outer atmosphere occurs at scales that we have been unable to resolve with existing telescopes. So, I think the Inouye telescope will really help there. Excuse me. [interruption]

High-resolution work both from space and from the ground are important to gain enough understanding of the basic physics at the micro level to get the answers we need to maybe make better predictions of solar weather and space weather and just to understand how the physics that is so important in a lot of the universe operates. It’s really convenient to have a star that’s nearby.

Thompson:

[Laughing] Yeah, for many reasons. I’m going to get back to some stuff, but I’m going to switch gears first. I want to ask you about your decision to run for state legislature. I’m curious how you came to even want to do that. Is that something that had been brewing for a while?

Acton:

Well, why did I decide to run for the legislature? That’s a good question. My dad served in the legislature in the ’30s. He won by one vote. [laughs] So, I had that heritage. I’m pretty liberal in my politics, and that particular year that I ran, 2006, it was really a toss-up which party was going to control the House of Representatives in Helena. I thought, “Why not give it a try?” You know, if we can get one more person elected, a Democrat, then Governor Schweitzer will have a lot better chance to do what needs to be done.

So, I chose a difficult district, and I thought I had a chance to win because I could play the astronaut card, which is always helpful. My wife came from the Dutch community out here west of town. I had a lot of friends out there, and I thought even though it’s a very strong Republican district, that maybe I might have a chance. So, I decided to give it a go and worked my tail off and didn’t quite make it. In fact, I didn’t even come close. [laughs]

Thompson:

But I mean people are calling for more and more scientists to get involved in politics. What role do you see scientists having?

Acton:

Well, I think it would be helpful to have some more scientists in politics because science is a way of thinking. You make your decisions based on evidence, and so that’s a useful way to make community decisions, too. By and large, the challenges of getting elected are not something that a whole lot of us want to face. We don’t make it easy. [laughs] So, I don’t think things are going to change a lot, but I would hope that we can have a significant number of scientists in office at every level, you know, for a period of time. You don’t have to be a career politician. I’m not going to run again, but then I’m 81 years old and maybe it’s time to do something else.

Thompson:

Do you think there’s something you could have done different, or just pick a different district?

Acton:

Oh, well, I could have easily won in a different district, but those districts were already electing Democrats. So, I needed to go to an area where it was hard to win and see if I could win. I don’t regret the decision, but it is quite a challenge. There’s not much you can do when you’re running for office. I’d envisioned myself giving speeches, people listening. Well, you don’t get a chance to do that anymore. You don’t give speeches. You publish newspaper ads and most of the people out there probably didn’t take the Chronicle anyway. It’s hard, and so you go out knocking on doors and that is the most discouraging work in the world because nobody’s home, and when they are home, the last thing they want to do is talk to somebody running for office. So, it’s really, really challenging to somehow convince a significant number of people to vote for you. I don’t know what I would do differently than what we tried to do. I mean, we knocked on 7,000 doors, you know.

Thompson:

It’s sad. That’s why a lot of people don’t try, because it is hard.

Acton:

It’s puzzling. You can do things to become notorious and then people will at least recognize your name, but that isn’t necessarily good practice. [laughs] I don’t know. I have a lot of respect for people that actually do it. I really do.

Thompson:

That’s good. I mean, throughout your career you have won a lot of awards from AAS Hale Award to NASA Achievement Awards. Do any of them come to the forefront as being the most meaningful?

Acton:

Well, it’s sort of been my philosophy if someone wants to do something nice for you, you should let them. [laughs] It sort of boils down to that. I have to say that I do not personally feel qualified to get a lot of the honors that I’ve had. A lot of it comes from the flying in space thing. People love astronauts and they like to be nice to astronauts. But it’s of course a pleasure. Last night I was one of the prime winners 24 Over 64 of the Bozeman Chronicle thing, and that was so nice to hear people say nice things about you. But it’s pretty important to recognize that the way things work out is not always based on merit. Luck has a lot to do with it.

Thompson:

Luck does, but it’s also giving people a role model, somebody to look up to. When I grew up, that’s what astronauts were to me, were role models, and what we don’t have as much now. It’s not as much in the limelight. Do you think that the United States should still be sending up astronauts? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Acton:

Oh, I think we ought to go to Mars. I think the things we will learn doing it and the interest that there will be on the part of folks in general on seeing it done make it worthwhile. Scientifically, I don’t think it’s any great shakes. Probably better off to send a robot, but robots can’t grab the soul and the spirit the way seeing some other person do it. But it is certainly true that having flown in space gives you advantages which are totally unfair. That’s just the way it works out, that you’re a different person in the eyes of everybody else just because you spent a week weightless.

Thompson:

You did put in a lot of work to get there, though!

Acton:

Well, but it was wonderful, fascinating, interesting work.

Thompson:

That’s wonderful.

Acton:

But to get paid for doing it is just amazing.

Thompson:

That is amazing. I’ve made you cover a lot in a short period of time. Is there anything major that I missed (or minor)?

Acton:

Well, I think the idea behind all this is to get some insights into how heliophysics came to be. I think back on my days at the University of Colorado at the High Altitude Observatory in the Department of Astrogeophysics when Walt Roberts had the vision of bringing together a group of scientists that covered the territory all the way from the troposphere and below to the center of the Sun, that this is a highly linked system and we should think of it in those terms. So, Walt and others were instrumental in bringing the branches together in a way that has turned out to be very productive, very important, and a lot of fun. Heliophysics is fun because you’re near enough to the star to see it in detail. We now can have tools to get above the atmosphere and to plumb the atmosphere, and so we have such a much better understanding of things like what’s happening in Texas today with this amazing… 50 inches of rain! Can you even imagine that? And yet we understand pretty well what’s happening and we’re able to predict it.

So, heliophysics comes right down to the surface of the Earth. The Sun is producing the energy that heats those oceans, and therefore water evaporates better. Therefore, you make better clouds, and one thing leads to another and we’re understanding in a way we haven’t understood before how it all plays out. I find that highly rewarding.

So, I’m very pleased that the scientific spacefaring nations of the world have been willing to work on the heliophysics system as a system. If we do send Joe Blow and Mary Blow to Mars, we’re going to need to understand the best we possibly can what the Sun is likely to do for the next month or so. So, I’m delighted to have a chance to say my piece for this thing. I think that’s pretty darn special. The fact that the taxpayers in the United States, through their elected representatives, through the agencies created by these representatives, have been able to devote a tiny fraction of our national wealth to investigating these things speaks well of us.

Thompson:

That’s fantastic. Yeah, I mean heliophysics, because it encompasses everything from the Sun to the Earth, it takes a lot of different kinds of people on Earth to understand it. It’s engineers. It’s scientists. It’s policymakers. All those people.

Acton:

You betcha. I’ve been alive at just the right time to be a part of it.

Thompson:

[laughs] Well, thank you for your contribution. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Dr. Acton.

Acton:

Well, you’re welcome.