George Doschek

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ORAL HISTORIES

Interviewed by

Ryan Hearty

Interview date

August 12, 2019

Location

American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland

See catalog record for this interview.

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Interview of George Doschek by Ryan Hearty on August 12, 2019,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/48422

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No, I just went to the bookstore and looked for astronomy books. They didn’t have a lot at any one time, but they’d get some new things. You’d have to go downtown, and I’d take a streetcar to get there, and then walk to the bookstore. And eventually I just collected a lot of reading material. When my interest in astronomy began, I didn’t know anything about it.

I discovered Saturn, you know. [laughs] I think I should put that on my CV. I had the telescope out one night, and I was looking at different stars just for the heck of it, and then I came across Saturn with its rings. I was using a 3.5” Newtonian reflector, I think with a 60x eyepiece. I thought you needed a 200-inch Hale telescope to see the rings. [laughs] I ran down our basement stairs and excitedly told my dad that incredibly, I could see the rings of Saturn.

Hearty:

So, you were learning the night sky on your own.

Doschek:

Yes. Another time, I believe in 1957, I was out observing and I saw a relatively small and compact cloud in the sky. After I had looked around with my telescope for a while, and when I was about ready to stop, I looked up, and the cloud hadn’t moved at all. I thought, “Well, I know clouds move.” I put my telescope on it, and it was Comet Arend-Roland, which is one of the great comets of the previous century. News didn’t travel the way it travels today and I was totally unaware of the comet. Also, because at my young age I didn’t pay attention to the news. Undoubtedly, the comet was mentioned in the news. I continued to observe the comet and made drawings of it. Later that same year Comet Myrkos appeared and I got a photograph of it with my dad’s camera mounted on a tripod.

Hearty:

I could see why that would inspire you to do more in astronomy. You were discovering things.

Doschek:

In the fun activities, I played cards with two of my friends on Friday nights. We’d play mostly hearts. We played in the upstairs room of a large house where the rooms were rented out to students. And we smoked cigars. The three of us would get up in his room and light up. [laughs] Well, you know, the smoke and very strong odor would go throughout the house, and nobody ever complained. Those were different days. We also could smoke in class.

There could be problems with smoking. One time we had our homework graded by another graduate student that was ahead of us, and he asked me to stop smoking. And I said, “Sure, all right.” But I didn’t stop. Then the graduate student wouldn’t talk to me. I asked him what’s wrong, what did I do?” And he said, “I asked you to stop smoking. You didn’t.” I said, “OK, I’ll stop. I’ll stop. I’ll stop.” I did stop in class, but a lot of people smoked. In fact, many people, including me, smoked at NRL for a while. A long time.

Hearty:

Right. But you had quit then?

Doschek:

No, no. Just when this particular grad student was involved. I started smoking because somebody stole a cup from one of the students and wanted to fill it up with cigar ash or cigarette ash. So, I joined in the effort and we filled it up with ash, and put it back in his mailbox, something like that. That’s how I started to smoke cigars. But I didn’t inhale. I never inhaled. And for a while, I also smoked a pipe, but I never inhaled that either. So, I never had a real smoking problem. I no longer smoke, and for many years prior to quitting I only smoked one cigar a few times a week on my porch.

Hearty:

I want to know about your PhD, your advisor, and your work. How did you decide on what to work on for your PhD? And did you continue working on your thesis topic when you went to NRL?

Doschek:

The topic I got involved with was radiative transfer. Radiative transfer is very important in aeronomy and stellar atmospheres. My thesis advisor, Tom Donahue, suggested that I work on a radiative transfer topic. I became interested in it and thought this would be a good theoretical project. Tom Donahue was interested in radiative transfer because of its application to the Earth’s atmosphere. However, Donahue gave me a very tough problem of radiative transfer to work on. It turned out to be quite difficult, and I used an aeronomy technique that is not, I don’t think, used as much in at least solar astronomy. They didn’t connect. The upper atmospheric group didn’t connect much with the astronomy group. My thesis work formed the basis of a proposal I wrote when I applied for a job at NRL.

Eventually, I did a thesis and paper on radiative transfer, trying to solve problems where simple approximations weren’t valid. The paper was written at NRL and was published in The Astrophysical Journal. I applied for astronomy jobs at various universities but because I was not really an astronomy student and didn’t know the right people, I wound up being interviewed at NRL by Herbert Friedman. I was delighted to find that Herb Friedman was pursuing X-ray astronomy. And there was also a substantial solar group run by Richard Tousey. The proposal I wrote for my NRL employment was actually sent to NSF. It was still a radiative transfer proposal, to work with George Carruthers at NRL on radiative transfer in the interstellar medium. This proposal was accepted. I got a part-time federal appointment until my grant funds arrived.

On the first day that I arrived at NRL I met Talbot Chubb, who was a Branch Head. I hadn’t told anyone at NRL that I would arrive on that day. Talbot was quite busy, so he introduced me to John Meekins, who had just obtained solar flare X-ray spectra using Bragg crystal spectrometers, and I spent a lot of time with John looking at these spectra. His instrument was flown on the NASA 4th Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO). I became very interested in the spectra and so instead of working with George Carruthers, I decided to work on analyzing the solar flare spectra. You could make research changes like that in those days.

After being given a tour of the Division, I realized that the main activity of the Division was experimental. I thought it might be interesting to also get involved in this. I didn’t mind getting in the laboratory, and although I didn’t like building things normally a lot, I was comfortable around bandsaws and drill presses and stuff like that, or vacuum systems. So, I knew how to be careful and not damage the equipment. [laughs] That’s how I got started in solar physics. If I had shown up, you know, it’s the butterfly effect, a couple of minutes later, Talbot may have passed me to another person, and I may have started doing research in another field. [laughs] The Division management was wonderful, it allowed such changes in research direction.

Hearty:

Did you immediately go to NRL after your degree?

Doschek:

Oh, well, I wasn’t much of a bridge. I was in Talbot Chubb’s group which at that time was like an empire. He was a Branch Head, but he had an X-ray astronomy group, a UV astronomy team, a couple of aeronomy groups, and a solar X-ray group. Tousey was mostly all solar. He had a UV group but did not venture into solar X-rays, which I started doing when I got to NRL. I didn’t interact much with the people in Tousey’s group at that time.

Eventually Chubb’s empire was broken up into individual Branches. I was made a Branch Head of a Branch Friedman created and called the Solar-Terrestrial Relationships Branch. After that the people in Chubb’s Branch interested in rocket astronomy sort of forgot about me. [laughs]

However, in later years astronomy people that were in Chubb’s Branch became interested in stellar spectroscopy. For a while I interacted a lot with them, because by that time I was well-versed in UV through X-ray spectroscopy of highly ionized atoms. I believe I even wound up as PI on one proposal they had. My memory is a little uncertain here. But I do remember helping Herb Gursky, who replaced Friedman as Division Superintendent when Friedman retired, with a spectrometer proposal for flight on the NASA Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), now called Chandra. But this proposal was not accepted by NASA. At the moment, I don’t think there’s anyone in the astrophysics group in the Division that knows a great deal about what I do in solar physics. I don’t think I was much of a bridge builder except in spectroscopy when they were doing it. They’re not doing high-resolution spectroscopy in the X-ray or EUV region anymore. At the moment I only do spectroscopy in solar physics.

Astronomy and physics is very specialized, and people working in these highly specialized research areas need to get funding for their work. They are highly focused in what they do. It’s not like, “Oh, I’m a general physicist. Today I’ll work on the Sun. Tomorrow I’ll work on the spiral structure of the galaxy.” That doesn’t happen very often now, I don’t think, but it was quite common in the past. You tell me why. [laughs]

I should mention that Herb Gursky was one of Friedman’s main competitors before he came to NRL. He worked for Giacconi. But he, like Friedman, was an inspiration to me. He was not at all like Friedman. But he strongly believed in basic research and supported me throughout my career and his career at NRL. He eventually died of cancer and was replaced by Jill Dahlburg. Jill was a tough manager, but also strongly supported science. All my higher-up managers strongly supported science throughout my career. How lucky can a scientist get?

Hearty:

Let’s talk a bit about these spectrometers that became your specialty.

Doschek:

OK.

Hearty:

When you got to NRL in 1968, what did you see as the role of instrument-building at NRL at that time, or the status of it?

Doschek:

Well, the entire Space Science Division was and to some extent still is an experimental group, and you can’t do experimental physics without developing instruments. [laughs] That was and is very important. In doing space research astronomy and solar physics, developing new instruments and missions is the way we make progress. I don’t think the Navy would support us if we turned into a mainly theoretical group. For example, the Division’s development of gamma ray instrumentation was important to the military, i.e., they were looking for above-surface nuclear blasts. Now they’re worried about illegal radioactive material.

You always need new projects. When I got to be a Branch head, I thought I would always need a new project. However, I also wanted some data analysis and theory so that we could try to understand what we were looking at. After all, comprehending what we are looking at is what science is, and we fundamentally were and still are a science organization. My Branch was made up of a solar group from Richard Tousey’s Rocket Spectroscopy Branch, and a solar X-ray group from Chubb’s Branch. And it was a very good combination because I got the guys who were working on coronagraphs from Tousey’s Branch. [laughs]

As I said, I knew quite a bit about the Sun because I’d read a lot about the Sun as an amateur. I knew about the visible light Sun. I knew about the corona and the chromosphere and the transition region. That’s where astronomy was very helpful, because I had quite a solar experience.

As I said, my honeymoon consisted of getting set up in an office with the necessary furniture, etc., and starting to look at flare X-ray spectra. The spectra covered a wavelength range from about two angstroms up to twenty angstroms. There were many spectral lines in this part of the spectrum that were not observed in solar spectra before, and many were unidentified, so now my university physics training in atomic physics and spectroscopy became very important.

There was a British group that was way ahead of us in terms of their understanding of spectroscopy in the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray spectral regions. However, we had excellent data at that time for a first look at what was there. Werner Neupert at Goddard Space Flight Center, other people from the Aerospace Corporation, and groups outside the US also had good solar X-ray spectra. So, the fun began in trying to identify the lines. You had to work out how you do this. Our X-ray spectra did not have very high spectral resolution because John Meekins and Bob Kreplin, who built the instrument, wanted it to cover a substantial wavelength region. They bent the crystal in order to cover a large wavelength range.

I slowly learned how to approach identifying spectral lines. I started to work with Robert Cowan at Los Alamos, an outstanding atomic physics theorist, who developed a computer problem that calculated energy levels and wavelengths of spectral lines of highly ionized ions. He sent me output from his programs that was extremely helpful to me. I can’t remember how I became aware of him. But I was never shy in those days in approaching people who could help me. [laughs]

I knew that the spectra we had were composed of many blended features. I wanted to fly a higher resolution X-ray spectrometer that would resolve all the lines. One of the people from Friedman’s solar X-ray group, my previous Section Head of the Section I was in, Bob Kreplin, liked to build instruments. We decided to propose a Bragg crystal X-ray spectrometer for the Air Force Space Test Program (STP) that would resolve all or most of the spectral lines. Then, at about the same time, and while I was still in Chubb’s group, I got a call from Dave Nagel, who was a Division Head of another NRL Division. He wanted to do EUV and X-ray spectroscopy on a laser facility they had at NRL in the Plasma Physics Division.

Also, and about at the same time, Uri Feldman came to NRL from Israel into the Space Science Division. He was an expert spectroscopist and experimentalist and taught me a lot about experimental spectroscopy. I reciprocated by explaining the uses of spectroscopy in doing solar physics and what could be done with the spectral lines. My research with Uri over the years is one of the highlights of my career. It was extremely rewarding and a lot of fun.

Uri and I started to do experiments using the laser. We were able to use old spectrometers that Tousey used in rocket experiments. They were stored on the fourth floor, a floor used as a Space Science Division storage area. They were just sitting up there, and they were small, so you could mount them in small chambers that were compatible with the laser experimental chamber. These spectrometers were EUV spectrometers. And Uri and I also started to do experimental spectroscopy work with the laser in the X-ray spectral region using Bragg crystals. I believe Richard Tousey funded some of it. We identified flare and active region spectral lines and investigated helium-like multiplets and associated dielectronic satellite lines. The shortest wavelength X-ray spectrometer was a rather crude Bragg crystal spectrometer that we built. The EUV spectrometer was a grazing incidence rocket instrument built at Goddard. Uri Feldman was a post-doc at Goddard before he came to NRL. He used this instrument which was built by Bill Behring at Goddard for rocket flights. We were able to use it at NRL. It is a superb instrument; Bill Behring took great care in its construction.

We took a lot of spectra with the EUV spectrometer. We identified a lot of spectral lines from ions heavier than calcium. The laser let us produce ionization stages that were previously not accessible. The laser allowed us to produce plasma with million-degree temperatures. For example, for iron we produced spectral lines of Fe XVIII, Fe XIX, Fe XX, and Fe XXI and identified them. We published a lot of papers on the identifications.

We were in close competition with Brian Fawcett from the Appleton-Rutherford Laboratory in the UK. We needed sometimes to add notes in proof also crediting Brian with making the same identifications. Brian has called this “our Atlantic Partnership”. It was an extremely exciting time in both my life and Uri’s.

In addition to the laboratory work, Herb Friedman asked Uri and I to start work on the EUV solar spectra obtained by Richard Tousey on the Skylab manned space station. Then we again had buckets of spectral lines from diverse observations all over different regions on the Sun. But perhaps that’s a later story.

As an aside involving laboratory work, and I can’t remember how this started, I also got involved in building a space instrument, a Thomson X-ray polarimeter. It was a very interesting solar flare experiment involving such lovely materials as sheet beryllium and lithium. I was the principal investigator and it got flown on an NRL Solrad 11 satellite. Unfortunately, the timing on the spacecraft had a problem so the instrument couldn’t work. But throughout my career I’ve had excursions. Let’s go back to spectroscopy, which is the field that makes my career.

When I became Branch Head in 1979, the STP satellite (P78-1) with the high-resolution Bragg crystal spectrometers (called SOLFLEX) that we had proposed was launched. I had figured out what spectral lines to look at and found out what kind of crystals were needed. I had the crystals manufactured at NIST, which was then maybe called the National Bureau of Standards. There was an expert crystallographer there, Richard Deslattes, and he made the crystals. We obtained fantastic X-ray spectra of solar flares with all the lines resolved. We published many papers on the lines, their identifications, and their value to solar physics. We also helped people at the Aerospace Corporation identify X-ray spectra from their spectrometers (called SOLEX) on the STP satellite.

The other significant aspect of P78-1 was that people in Tousey’s Branch, who were now in my Branch, flew a white light coronagraph (called SOLWIND) on the satellite. They had discovered coronal mass ejections with a previous coronagraph flown on the NASA OSO-7 spacecraft when they were still in Tousey’s Branch. In fact, P78-1 was the backup OSO-7 spacecraft. The P78-1 coronagraph results produced a huge impact in the solar physics community, and established NRL as the king of space-flown coronagraphs. We have the only operating coronagraph that’s looking at the Sun now, the LASCO coronagraph, flown on the European Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. If that coronagraph fails, we will currently not have a direct CME warning. A monitoring new NRL coronagraph is currently being built at NRL and funded by NOAA. SOLFLEX and especially SOLWIND greatly increased my Branch’s standing in the solar physics community.

The Japanese have always been very careful in deciding who to work with. Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) in the UK also were interested in providing an X-ray spectrometer and the American SMM spectroscopy PI pursued contributing an X-ray Telescope. I think Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) also proposed an X-ray Telescope.

The Japanese sent a team to visit us to see what facilities we had, meet people who would work on an X-ray spectrometer, and see what kind of instrument we had in mind. We proposed flat crystal spectrometers, which require scanning a spectrum by rotating the crystals. But the Japanese didn’t like this because their spacecraft was not very heavy and they didn’t want mechanisms if they could avoid it because the jitter, even if very small, would shake the spacecraft and lower the spatial resolution of the X-ray telescope that was to be a key instrument on the spacecraft. I assume they sent teams to visit all the other groups who wanted to participate.

The Solar Maximum Mission had three PIs for their solar spectrometers. They were Loren Acton at Lockheed in the U.S., and Alan Gabriel and Len Culhane in Britain. Each group made contributions to the X-ray instrument. Although Acton was pursuing the X-ray telescope, he was nevertheless still interested in the X-ray spectroscopy contribution that we and his other UK colleagues might make. One day he called me and asked if I would consider collaborating with Len Culhane at MSSL and propose a bent crystal spectrometer like they had on SMM instead of a flat crystal spectrometer. If you bend the crystal slightly, a whole spectral region can be viewed at once and scanning is unnecessary.

I knew Len well and got along with him. I thought this was a good idea and I contacted Len and asked if he was interested in a collaboration. He was, and we got together on designing an instrument. The most important task was to find good crystals and look at important spectral multiplets in the solar flare X-ray spectrum. But there was an issue.

Hearty:

What was that?

Doschek:

Well, the issue was who was going to be the PI of the spectrometer? Usually we people involved in providing space instruments want to be the PI, but the Japanese didn’t want an NRL PI because we were a military lab, and groups in Japan would strongly oppose this. At that time, I was Co-Chair of the AAS Solar Physics Division and my job was to help prepare the scientific program for our next meeting. I helped do this and the meeting was the AAS summer meeting held in Ames, Iowa.

Len Culhane and Loren Acton were also at this meeting and one evening we got in a car and took a ride through or around a cornfield. Because of the military issue both Loren and Len proposed that Len should be the PI and that would solve everything. I agreed and Len became the PI. This has been fantasized into a story where if I didn’t agree, they would just shoot me and dump me in the cornfield. [laughs] Not being PI was fine with me. I really was most interested in getting a hardware project for my Branch. Who would wind up as PI at that time was not a priority concern. What finally happened was that there were three PIs. Len was overall instrument PI, I was the US PI, and E. Hiei was the Japanese PI. All of this was done independently from NASA. We worked with a young scientist in Japan, Tetsuya Watanabe, in building our spectrometer package, the Bragg Crystal Spectrometer (BCS).

Hearty:

How did you decide which group would do what and how was the NRL contribution funded?

Doschek:

We decided that NRL would provide the crystals and structure, and I believe a calibration source, and a structure template. MSSL would provide the detectors, electronics, overall assembly and testing. MSSL also worked with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in partitioning their contributions. All the groups decided on the science that would be done with the instrument.

Well, mostly. But there is a difference between abundances in the solar corona and abundances in the photosphere. In the corona, elements with first ionization potentials (FIPs) greater than 10 eV are about 2 to 3 times more abundant in the corona than in the photosphere. This includes elements such as silicon, iron, calcium, potassium, etc. Elements with FIPs greater than 10 eV such as argon and neon are believed to have the same abundance in the corona as in the photosphere. Sulfur sits on the border. Uri Feldman studied the composition of the corona extensively in the Yohkoh era and wrote many papers about it. Martin Laming at NRL, a scientist I hired years ago when I was a Branch Head, developed a theory that explains the FIP Effect. The theory not only explains the FIP Effect but also explains the inverse FIP Effect. It was found that the reverse situation exists in some stars, stars with strong magnetic fields and huge starspots that cover large areas of their photospheres.

A few years ago, around 2014, I started to look at the abundance ratio of calcium (low FIP) and argon (high FIP) in flares. My colleague, Harry Warren, who I continue to work with, believes that flares should have photospheric abundances because the chromosphere is violently heated and simply explodes into the corona at speeds of about a million miles an hour. We thought that the FIP Effect, which involves waves, wouldn’t have time to change any abundances. But with EIS we found that the calcium to argon abundance ratio was coronal! I wrote a small computer program to investigate this in different areas of flares. And one day I looked at the footpoint of a nice flare loop and obtained a shocking result. At the footpoint, and partway up the loop, the calcium to argon abundance ratio was much smaller than in the photosphere. I had found the inverse FIP Effect in the Sun. What a surprise. Harry investigated other flares very quickly; he’s an ace with computers. He found that, as for the flare I was working on, that the FIP Effect occurred near Sunspots. A more thorough investigation has revealed that the inverse FIP Effect occurs near Sunspots over very tiny areas. However, near photospheric abundances can be found over more extended regions around Sunspots. The small spatial extent of the inverse FIP Effect reflects the fact that Sunspots are tiny compared with starspots. But the inverse FIP Effect had never been seen in the Sun before our observation of it. I was very happy to find something completely new about the Sun’s corona.

Hearty:

What about the competition you had when doing your spectroscopic studies? Were there other groups doing the same thing?

Doschek:

Oh yes! The main competing group was Brian Fawcett at Culham Laboratory. And the Soviets had a group at the Institute for Spectroscopy in Moscow. We were all making highly ionized atoms using lasers. As I said earlier, Brian was writing papers and identifying lines. And that’s when Uri and I were doing line identifications. We had the theoretical support from Bob Cowan at Los Alamos. He was an outstanding atomic physicist. To repeat, we’d write a paper and, just as I was about to submit the paper for publication, we’d get a paper from Brian, and one or more of the lines that we had identified were also identified by Brian, and we would have to write a footnote before submitting our paper. Eventually as I said, years later, Brian called our relationship an “Atlantic Partnership”. This was quite touching to me, considering that when it was going on it was a serious competition. But we scientists basically support each other. Sometimes we collaborate and at other times we compete. But in the end, it’s just friendship. It’s amazing we did as well as we did. A big help was Bob Cowan’s theory and the really good data we obtained from the NRL laser.

Hearty:

What about competition for projects during your career? Could you comment on that?

Doschek:

Yes. The people in the world-wide solar physics communities are like brothers and sisters trying to get favors from their parents, the funding agencies. So, with a research project, there are multiple groups that want funding. The funding is much larger for hardware projects; they help support many more people than a theoretical or data analysis research project. Competition for these is intense. For the solar groups at NRL, perhaps the key project that has sustained us ever since is the Department of Defense (DoD) P78-1 spacecraft. This satellite contained my colleagues and our X-ray spectroscopy SOLFLEX experiment, which was important for our final acceptance in the Japanese Yohkoh satellite with the UK, and subsequently with the Hinode project. But perhaps more important for all of us in both solar Branches was the NRL coronagraph experiment, called SOLWIND. Up to this time, the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) was the favored coronagraph institution, based on their superb instrument on Skylab and the high quality coronal scientists at HAO. This was so in spite of the fact that the most important phenomenon for space weather, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), was discovered by NRL with a coronagraph on a previous NASA spacecraft. HAO won a competition to fly a coronagraph on the NASA Solar Maximum Mission (SMM), and they looked like they would be the leading coronagraph group thenceforth.

But before SMM was launched, P78-1 was launched. SOLWIND was a much better coronagraph than the discovery coronagraph, and observed the whole Sun far out into the corona. The NRL coronagraph group, which was now in my Branch, wrote many outstanding science papers on results from SOLWIND. Many discoveries were made, such as the head-on CME, the statistics of CMEs and their association with interplanetary shocks, and the association of CMEs with flares of different sizes and intensities was made quantitative. So, we regained our position as a serious competitor to HAO.

The next opportunity that came along was to fly a coronagraph on the European/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). The coronagraph group in my Branch submitted a proposal for a coronagraph called LASCO, and we were accepted over the proposal submitted by HAO. The other solar Branch was part of the proposal and eventually, because of their extensive NASA management experience, they built LASCO. Space science is a tough business. NASA proposals are sent to scientific and engineering evaluation groups, and you have to be outstanding in both groups to be selected. I believe NRL has flown all the coronagraphs ever since LASCO, which is still operational and providing data. The number of discoveries made about the corona from LASCO are far too numerous to list here. It at the moment provides our only direct view of CMEs. As I said, after I retired my Branch was combined with the Solar Physics Branch and we are now a single Branch. NRL people in the combined solar group are now building a monitoring coronagraph for NOAA to keep track of CMEs that head towards the Earth. LASCO will not last forever. I think my best achievement as a manager was to keep this coronagraph group alive, after P78-1, during the time when there wasn’t anything for them to build, and did not split up the group and give them other unrelated things to do. I didn’t want to lose the expertise to build coronagraphs. I just kept the group together, in spite of complaints from people that the two technicians in this group had too little to do considering their pay grades.

Hearty:

What other projects came along that you were involved with?

Doschek:

I tried to get involved in any project that came along. After the launch of Hinode, I pursued the next Japanese mission for many years. But let’s back up to around the time when I was chair of the AAS Solar Physics Division (SPD). It was a long time ago; I hope I haven’t got the times messed up and that my memory is good. Then there was no NASA Heliophysics Division. Solar physics was in the nighttime astronomy part of NASA. At that time, it was decided by the US solar physics community and NASA that the next big solar mission would be a 1-meter class white light telescope that would be flown on the Shuttle for a week. Alan Title at Lockheed was the PI of the telescope. But at NASA HQ I believe Charlie Pellerin was head of the NASA astrophysics science program. He was the manager that would push for flying the solar telescope called the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT).

Actually, SOT had a UV telescope designed by Dick Dunn that was part of the experiment package. There was a SOT working group, and I was on it because of the UV component. We were hoping Charlie would promote SOT for NASA’s next mission but he was also trying to promote the highly popular “one billion (1B)” missions such as Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer. Charlie called SOT a solar microscope because of its high spatial resolution. The white light solar scientists on the working group were adamant about not reducing the size of the mirror below 1 meter. They thought the fundamental structures in the solar photosphere would require a 1-meter instrument to resolve them. In hindsight, this was a mistake. Reducing the mirror size would have greatly reduced the cost estimate for SOT. Reality resulted in a 50 cm SOT being flown on Hinode years later. Another problem we had was that the NASA Chief Scientist, Frank McDonald, didn’t like SOT because I think he thought that in one week we wouldn’t get enough data to justify the cost. There may have been other reasons as well.

Around that time NASA HQ had a scientist who was doing space physics, the rest of heliospheric research apart from solar physics. His name was Stan Shawhan, and he was an outstanding promoter of space missions to study the local plasma environment near the Earth. Somehow, I don’t know who arranged it, Stan, Len Fisk, Tom Krimigis, and I had a dinner meeting at a restaurant in Silver Spring and decided to try to form a Heliospheric Division. The name Heliophysics came later. We went down to NASA HQ and asked the NASA top science program manager to form a new division, a solar and space physics division, that would encompass all the research done on the Sun and heliosphere out to the edge of the solar system. It would also cover the Earth’s ionosphere and of course the magnetosphere.

I’m pretty hazy after so many years about all of this; I hope the gist of it is right. NASA was impressed and was ultimately convinced that a new Division should be formed. There were lots of people pushing for this. Tragically, Shawhan was a diebetic and died. But somehow the new Division went forward and was created. In the new Division solar physics competes with other space physics missions, and not with Hubble, etc. But because of the large and exciting scientific research which these big missions had, SOT was never selected. For a while, it was changed into an orbital spacecraft mission, and Brueckner at NRL was chosen to build the UV instrument. But ultimately this mission also never materialized.

In the new Division we started to get involved more with the American Geophysical Union. One of the scientists in my Branch, Spiro Antiochos, pushed hard for this. Eventually a solar section was put into the AGU and solar physicists started attending both AAS meetings and AGU meetings. Today the SPD meets with both the AAS and AGU, and sometimes meets on its own. This integrates solar physics into the entire heliosphere.

Hearty:

Another thing I wanted to ask you about. You had mentioned that when you first thought of NRL before coming to NRL, there was a sense, maybe you had it, and maybe people you knew had it, that this was a military laboratory, where you worked on applied military problems, and it would be hard to do basic science.

Doschek:

Well, yes, when I first heard about NRL, but when I went there for an interview with Herbert Friedman, I found that the Space Science Division was doing a lot of exciting space science, including astronomy, and I really wanted to go there. Yes, of course we are supposed to solve problems that are important for the military, that’s the main goal, but there was a sense at that time that basic research in many areas of science, if at first seemingly not significant for the military, are, after research is done, found to have important military applications. Throughout my career, I found that the NRL Research Advisory Committee (RAC), that advises the NRL DoR, have a great interest in basic research. They want to hear about proposed exciting new research from NRL scientists who are greatly excited about their research. A good example is the discovery of CMEs. The original research was focused on the solar corona, and what causes coronal heating. Well, the military really doesn’t care about what heats the solar corona. Knowing what heats the corona isn’t going to help the warfighter. But in pursuing solar corona research, CMEs were discovered. These are the main bad guys that damage orbiting spacecraft and ground-based power generators. A good CME not properly prepared for could cause billions of dollars of damage. The Navy is one of the larger users of space, so it is critically important to mitigate the effects of CMEs on military communications satellites. Without the NRL discovery, we wouldn’t know what solar source causes satellite blackouts. Now CMEs are central to space weather research and situational awareness for the military.

So, the laboratory sponsored almost any really interesting science. But if you are making a presentation to the RAC, you have to have a military relevance. In the case of the Sun this is easy. We realize that not only CMEs, but solar flares and solar activity in general are important in producing deleterious effects in the near-Earth environment.

Hearty:

OK. CMEs are a good example. But was it always the case that there had to be a military relevance?

Doschek:

Yes, there always had to be a possible military application. Another application was detecting rocket plumes with our EUV instrumentation. Applications like that got A-pluses. Military relevance is very important now. These decisions are made at least partly by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). One more example. For a while, we had a radio astronomy Branch in the Division. The Head of that Branch, Cornell Mayer, used a large radio telescope, for its time, that now sits on top of the NRL management building facing upwards towards the zenith to measure the temperature of Venus. I think he got close to the right temperature. But that telescope was not built to measure the temperature of Venus. It was probably meant to do something with submarines and detecting communication signals. I don’t really know. But I’m sure they didn’t build it to measure the temperature of Venus. They had some other application for it. So, sometimes what you do for science is very useful in the military, and sometimes what you do in support of a military application turns out to be extremely useful for science, like adaptive optics, for example.

Hearty:

Did you find anything in your research that at first seemed to have limited military application but after your work the results were really highly relevant to the military?

Doschek:

You mean, research that at first was targeted towards what seemed like a mostly science application but later had a very relevant military application? You mean like CMEs? Well, yes, all solar research has military relevance because of space weather. When I started out at NRL, I didn’t know where my funding came from. I didn’t have management responsibilities then. I just worked on solar flares that other people got the funding to support. I was basically a postdoc.

Later I found out that there were important things to consider about the funding and the work, like having a plan for completing the work, and how it may transition to a useful application. But when I first started working, none of this was on my radar. I just was paid, and I kept my wife very happy. That’s all I remember. My colleagues and I really enjoyed what we were doing. It was so much fun. It was fun working in a laboratory and getting hands on an instrument. We had Goddard technicians who would come down and help us. They were friends of Uri Feldman, who first did a postdoc at Goddard before coming to NRL.

Uri and I participated in a Goddard rocket experiment with the 3-meter grazing incidence EUV spectrometer built by Bill Behring at Goddard. I took the spectrometer to Ball Brothers in Boulder, Colorado to do a shake test. Then I went to the launch site in White Sands, New Mexico and participated in preparing the instrument for launch, but mainly in preparing the dark room for film development. If I remember correctly, we developed the film at White Sands. I remember sweeping the floor of the dark room. [laughs] This was the only hands-on rocket experience I had in my career.

They encouraged publication. I would say that potential NRL funding is more of a drive for good research projects. [laughs]

OK. Here is what I remember about crystals. This may or may not be entirely accurate. I believe the improvement in crystal spectrometers over what was used to obtain the data I worked on when I got to NRL was simply to use perfect crystals instead of so-called mosaic crystals. I think mosaic crystals have crystal planes composed of very much smaller crystals slightly misaligned with respect to each other. This broadens their so-called rocking curves or basically their point spread functions. Furthermore, the person who built these early NRL spectrometers bent the crystals slightly to enable a larger wavelength band to be observed. These are the types of crystals flown on NASA’s fourth and sixth Orbiting Solar Observatories (OSO). On the P78-1 spacecraft, the NIST physicist who made our crystals picked so-called perfect crystals such as Germanium with very narrow rocking curves. The P78-1 instrument covered four narrow wavelength ranges which I chose. These had much higher spectral resolution than the ones on OSO-4 and OSO-6. Perfect crystals were also used on the NASA SMM spacecraft. We crushed the solar X-ray spectrum between about 1.5 to 20 Angstroms with these crystals for SOLFLEX and the SOLEX instrument from the Aerospace Corporation.

The situation for the extreme ultraviolet was much more complicated. On Skylab the gratings were gold coated I believe, and EUV film was used to record data. The gold coating reflectivity at normal incidence is pretty small as well as the film sensitivity to EUV. Kodak made special EUV film that was refrigerated until use. It was tricky to handle the film because the silver halide crystals that made up the film could not be covered with a protective layer without eliminating the sensitivity to EUV. So, you had to be careful not to touch the film. It was loaded into instruments in dark rooms with only a feeble red light to help the experimenter. Around that time multilayer coatings were developed. These are alternate coatings of a light element such as Si and a heavy element such as Mo. We used a Mo/Si coatings on the EIS optics. This increases the reflectivity enormously from gold, but it’s still relatively small at maximum, around 25%, and falls off relatively quickly at shorter and longer wavelengths. Also developed were CCD cameras with small pixel sizes allowing for spectral and spatial resolution comparable to film. The combination of new CCDs and multilayer optics was a revolution in experimental solar physics, allowing the development of solar EUV imaging telescopes that produced spectacular data because normal incidence optics could be used with reasonable sensitivity instead of grazing incidence optics. EIS/Hinode had these enormous improvements over the earlier film instruments. The only shortcoming is that the wavelength ranges of the instrumentation is greatly reduced over the film instruments. But we know enough about the solar spectrum now to mitigate this problem.

In addition to the EUV, people are trying to improve X-ray spectroscopy with microcalorimeters. These are pixelated detectors that measure both the energy and location of an incoming photon. They work well in nighttime astrophysics but so far in solar physics they are not yet really useful because the Sun is too bright and effectively saturates the pixels.

The last X-ray astronomy spacecraft the Japanese flew contained a microcalorimeter package designed and built at Goddard. The satellite unfortunately broke up shortly after launch but the microcalorimeter obtained a spectacular X-ray spectrum of the H-like and He-like iron multiplets near 2 Angstroms of the intergalactic gas in the Perseus cluster. This seems like a good way to go in solar X-ray spectroscopy if possible. Perhaps imaging far out in the corona where the solar intensity is less could be doable.

Hearty:

You had good people that could build the instruments you wanted. How did those teams assemble?

Doschek:

Some of the instrumental scientists were put in my Branch by Herb Friedman when it was formed, or perhaps I hired them shortly after the Branch was formed. Charlie Brown and Uri Feldman are the scientists I am thinking of. Later Uri hired John Seely from the Plasma Physics Division. Clarence Korendyke was in the Solar Physics Branch. He was not involved in the X-ray business but was a key player for EIS/Hinode. He did the EIS work as part of my team but remained in the Solar Physics Branch. Charlie Brown was a key instrument player in both P78-1, Yohkoh, and EIS/Hinode. Charlie loves working on instrumentation. He likes to design and build things.

Charlie Brown, however, does more than just build instruments. He began as a spectroscopist who worked on the spectroscopy of neutral elements such as germanium. Unfortunately, this research was not a driving activity in solar physics so he gradually transferred his work to spectrometers involving highly ionized atoms. In his early career he wrote some extremely impressive papers in the spectroscopy of neutral atoms of elements like germanium, lead, gold, and boron. Today, I continue often to refer to his wavelength and intensity paper with Uri Feldman, John Seely, Clarence Korendyke, and Hiro Hara on the spectral lines of highly ionized ions seen by EIS/Hinode.

Charlie is now working on space instrumentation for studying the ionosphere. He’ll probably never retire, you know. [laughs] He says he likes playing with the toys too much. Other important players were John Mariska and Harry Warren, and of course Uri Feldman and John Seely. I’m working with Harry now. John and Harry were not instrument builders, but Harry is one now because of our continuing collaboration with the Japanese and Europeans on a new spectrometer. Their work mainly came into play after the instruments were launched, although John did a lot of work on the projected sensitivity of EIS/Hinode. They not only analyzed the data, but prepared a lot of the software for getting at and working with the data. All of these scientists, like me, were interested in spectroscopy.

I did some outreach on the Hinode mission after launch of EIS/Hinode. I gave a talk on the Hinode mission in a plenary session of the AAS in Hawaii. All of this was a lot of fun. It’s still a lot of fun when I now do it as an amateur astronomer.

Hearty:

How was the software for these missions developed?

Doschek:

A large number of people were involved. There are different kinds of software needed. It’s too much detail to go into here. Manuals about how to access and use data are prepared for users. Sometimes workshops are held to teach users how to work with the data. Others write software to remove instrumental issues that may occur after launch. And of course, the data packets have to be downloaded from the spacecraft and stored. EIS has two websites, one in the UK and one in Norway, for accessing and working on data. Security issues at NRL makes such a website difficult for us, although we have the data and software also at NRL. It is interesting to mention that when I came to NRL I used a mechanical computer to add, subtract, etc. I also used a slide rule – a slip stick. Larger computers were not interactive. You had to punch computer programs on computer cards and turn them in at a computer location to be read into the computer and run. Too bad even if you made a tiny, trivial mistake. The program wouldn’t compile. Interactive computing was a huge improvement.

Hearty:

So, how did advances in computing affect the instruments, the spectrometers?

Doschek:

The Branch scientists traveled a lot. I traveled a lot. We traveled to US meetings held by societies such as the American Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union. Sometimes the AAS Solar Physics Division meets separately from the major society meetings. We traveled to international meetings held by the International Astronomical Union and COSPAR, the Committee for Space Research. At all of these meetings scientists would or should give a presentation of work that they would like to talk about. We would submit abstracts that were subject to approval by the societies. These meetings are great opportunities to network and discuss future space experiments and collaborations. We also traveled to instrument meetings. For Yohkoh, meetings were rotated among MSSL, RAL, NRL, and either the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan or the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Research. At these meetings presentations on instrument hardware, software, and data analysis would be given. Updates about the spacecraft were given, etc. There were also meetings after launch. We have had yearly science meetings after the launch of Hinode where results, mostly obtained by the Hinode instruments, are discussed. We also have Science Working Group meetings where operational issues with the instruments are discussed, modes of operation are discussed, and the yearly Hinode publications are assessed. Also assessed is use of Hinode by the non-team member scientists throughout the world, which is coordinated monthly by Hinode team members, and how successful our training and outreach activities have been.

I wanted all the Sections to send somebody to the Solar Physics Division meetings. This was a way to meet new young scientists, show your face and work. I think this was a help in getting NASA proposals funded. The same for the AGU. I also wanted people who went to the Solar Physics Division meetings to go to the business meeting, and, if possible, serve on a Division committee. It’s important that scientists in the field know who you are and what you do. For similar reasons I always wanted people in the Branch to be part of committees such as the NASA Management and Operations Working Group. I found out about the possibility of participation in Yohkoh at one of these meetings.

There were a number of thorny issues that I had to confront. For example, consider promotions. Suppose I want to promote an instrument scientist, who spends his/her time designing and building an instrument. Well, that means this person will have a small publication record because he/she is not doing science directly. This person’s science is indirect and is of course critical for doing science at all! So, sometimes I would have to argue that papers aren’t important for this person, but their work is excellent and essential. This argument was to convince managers, who were used to seeing large publication lists, that this person also deserves a promotion. Another problem was that the scientists writing the papers could sometimes resent the promotion of someone who doesn’t write papers and is not seen at many science meetings. They would say where are the papers? Where is the science? [laughs] The Division Administrator always needed to have and bring in new hardware projects in order to maintain his/her budget. So, promotion of people who were trying to find new projects, set up collaborations, etc. tended to be favored over say a theorist, who might bring in all their support, but the support could never match the large budgets of an instrument project. You need projects. But, on the other hand, you’re trying to do science. So, how do you do both? You need people to build things and who are also experts in certain areas of engineering; people who talk to the companies and go and look at the products. And you also need people who analyze the data and do theory. If you’re called the Space Science Division, you’re supposed to do science. You need to do both. And so there’s a sort of trade-off as to what you’re doing and when you’re doing it. I’ve had excellent scientists that I didn’t promote right away over somebody else, because the other person was doing something more immediately associated with my projects. My projects were critical for the Branch. But the excellent scientist not involved in these projects feels resentful.

Another activity that could get thorny was new hires. Determining who to hire depended critically on their current reputation in the solar physics community, and perhaps much more important, how much funding did we think the scientist was capable of bringing in to the Branch. How successful is this person at obtaining NASA grants, how many grants do they have now, etc. If they could not generate their own funds, then it was up to the Section Head who wanted to hire them to support them, and up to me to approve it. This meant that we had to critically appraise our budgets and projections for the coming year or years. We only hired people that we thought were really good and would bring something new and positive into the Branch.

Hearty:

Did the managers like your Branch’s science mission?

Doschek:

Yes. The DoR I had for much of my career, Timothy Coffey, was very supportive. The same was true for the following DoR, John Montgomery. Alan Berman was I think skeptical of the Space Science Division at first, but came around to appreciating us.

Hearty:

Were any of your projects assigned by the management?

Doschek:

No, science at NRL tends to be from the bottom up. My last Division Administrator, Jill Dahlburg, did assign for me a specific project, but it was a good project and I didn’t mind trying to do it. The big project funds all came from NASA. But it is true that the Yohkoh X-ray spectrometers were funded by NRL and not by NASA.

There were two projects that I did that were managerial and I was asked to do them by management. One was a yearly assessment of the most interesting and important results in solar physics from all the scientists in both Branches. Also, at the same time I was responsible for getting the scientists who had NRL basic research funds to update progress on their NRL Work Units on a computer access form. I did not always have these responsibilities. These activities took a bit of work.

Another project that I was asked to do by the Division Superintendent Jill Dahlburg was to obtain short papers from Branch scientists on the most important projects the solar Branches had done or were doing. This was done to provide an historic record for the laboratory. This was a lab-wide effort initiated by John Montgomery, then DoR. I was happy to do this as I am proud of the projects I was involved with and proud of my association with NRL people and other projects in solar physics that I was not involved with. This was quite an effort. I wanted to write long papers to show how serendipity and luck were part of any successful project. But Jill opted for short papers, which in fact was really best since people did not want to write long papers and she wanted it finished before the Sun becomes a red giant. [laughs] She also devised a pictorial component with wall posters in our conference room with explanations so any visitor could look at what we have done and be impressed. I worked on providing pictures and text for the posters. This project took quite a bit of extra-curricular activity but in the end we have great papers published as NRL Memoranda.

You’re quite welcome. I enjoyed talking to you and reminiscing about many things in my career. I hope this is helpful to historians or others who read the transcript. I also hope it’s pretty accurate. Many of the things we have discussed occurred a very long time ago. My memory is really good but it is stressed over such long-time intervals. I may have gotten some things mixed up, etc. This must certainly be the situation for anyone who gives a long-time range interview.

[End of Interview]