Van Citters '69 recalls his contributions to Spitzer's famous idea

When Wayne Van Citters '69 was about to walk out of FitzRandolph Gate at the end of the last all-male academic year in Princeton's history, the looming Vietnam War and all of the social turmoil it caused threatened to suffocate the post-graduate academic ambitions of many of the students in his class. Van Citters was one of those students.

He wanted to be an astronomer. The U.S. government was saying there was a good chance he would be a soldier. To his good fortune, Van Citters was not asked to go to Vietnam, drawing a high number when the draft lottery was instituted and gaining the opportunity instead to serve his country — and the world — through science.

For the last 30 years Van Citters has worked his way up through the scientific hierarchy of the United States, and now serves as acting division director for the Astronomical Sciences unit of the National Science Foundation, based in Arlington, Va.

Asked how he feels about his position of authority within the foundation," Van Citters said, "I'm sort of mixed minds about it. There isn't anything quite like being personally involved with your hands on a project, where you can measure your own capabilites and your own talents. But I'm probably doing more good for the field doing what I'm doing now than being back in the lab somewhere."

"I think I'm doing the right thing right now. Plus, the older you get, the younger those guys [in the lab] get and the older you feel," he said with a chuckle.

Back when he was "in the lab," Van Citters played an instrumental role in developing important technology for the Hubble Space Telescope, the brainchild of the late Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, Jr., who first conceived the project in 1946 and who was one of Van Citters' professors at the University.

Working on the famous — and at times infamous, when the multibillion-dollar project failed shortly after its launch (it has since been repaired and has contributed much to the field of astronomical science, Van Citters pointed out) — telescope was an experience that shaped the early years of Van Citters' career and provided the foundation upon which he would become an expert in his field.

Van Citters earned his Ph.D. at the University of Texas, where soon after graduating from Princeton he was able to participate in some of the first lunar laser ranging tests that were made possible because of the July 1969 moon landing.

"Basically, they were shooting a beam up there and we were timing the round trip," Van Citters recalls. While the feat may not seem astronomical to most Americans anymore, at the time Van Citters was among the first American scientists to work with the data that Apollo 11 had made possible.

Van Citters married in June of 1970, finished his Ph.D. in 1976 and "shortly thereafter in '77 there was the announcement for opportunities to build instruments for the Hubble project," Van Citters said.

"In the end NASA chose two teams" to work on the project, Van Citters said — one from his school, the University of Texas, and one from the University of Wisconsin, which Van Citters said was world renowned at the time for its work in the field.

Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Van Citters would work until 1979 developing the High Speed Photometer for the Hubble telescope, an instrument that was designed "to measure fluctuations in light coming from various objects," he said.

The instrument measures primarily ultraviolet light, and by measuring its "changes you can tell, for example, how the structure of a neutron star changes, and that gives you clues to the actual nature of the pulsar," according to Van Citters.

After 1979, Van Citters would continue to be involved with the project through his new position at the NSF, where he ran the instrumentation program.

Eleven years of official work and research went into the High Speed Photometer and the other four main Hubble instruments (the Wide-Field Planetary Camera, the Faint Object Camera, the Faint Object Spectrograph and the Goddard High-Resolution Spectrograph) before the Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990.

But shortly after it was launched, Van Citters and the other scientists who had invested years of work in the project discovered something awful.

The light entering the telescope, which could resolve astronomical objects with an angular size of 0.05 arc seconds — akin to clearly seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from anywhere on the East Coast — was blurred, or "spherically aberrated," according to Van Citters.

A manufacturing error in the telescope's 1800-pound, 94.5-inch diameter primary mirror had caused the telescope not to be able to focus light on a single point, rendering Van Citters' instrument up to 70 percent less effective, he said.

"I was personally pretty sick at heart," Van Citters said. "We worked long and hard to design and build and prove an instrument to do the science we wanted to do, but because the image quality was so bad, easily 70 percent of our science was gone."

"So the solution was to put in a corrective set of optics, and unfortunately the only rational way to proceed was to take our instrument out and put that one in," Van Citters admitted, referring to the corrective optical device called the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, which was installed in the telescope in 1993 and made it nearly 100 percent operational.

So after 11 years and countless hours of hard work on the project, Van Citters' team's instrument was simply tossed aside.

But that setback, while disheartening, certainly did not diminish Van Citters' love for his work or devotion to his science.

"Now I spend 75 to 80 percent of my time administering the grants program, getting programs, tracking their progress and trying to maximize the return in taxpayer dollars for them," Van Citters said of one of the many jobs he has done within the foundation.

He said that his job since working directly on the Hubble telescope has been "tough." "You have to try to fight to get the money to do it," Van Citters said, referring to Congressional spending concerns that sometimes constrain his budget.

"While people may not always understand a lot about astronomy, they do so at some level, and there's a great willingness to invest in it because its a fascinating science," he said.

Van Citters, who now calls Annapolis, Md. home, said that many times the public will be more receptive to social welfare spending, such as a housing and urban development bill. "But the best we can do is to argue for the overall best in all the sciences," Van Citters said, "and eventually, all ships rise with the tide."

The father of a daughter and two sons, including son Peter '02, Van Citters intends to have nothing less than a full slate of business on hand for the future while performing his duties as acting division director.

The astronomical sciences division director is responsible for "the entire deal," Van Citters said, including the planetary, galactic, extra-galactic and other fields of the divison. "You have to balance all of those and all their needs," Van Citters admitted, "and wow, it's a challenge."