The TAPING RECORDER December 30, 2001 No. 12-01
News from and about Taping For The Blind, Inc.

Our editorial staff has numerous reasons for not getting the
RECORDER out, but since these crummy excuses have a lot to do with college
football and holidays, we expect you do not want to hear them. But we have
an extraordinary story to share with you, and we will use this forum to do so.

Dr. Bill Gordon has served with distinction on the Board of
Directors for Taping, including three years as Board President. If you
don't know what Dr. Gordon has done in his academic career, we offer the
following article taken from today's Houston Chronicle website:

Dec. 30, 2001, 11:23AM

Huge telescope's inventor receives top recognitions
By ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Science Writer

Bill Gordon didn't set out to build a telescope that would become an
engineering marvel and the stuff of scientific legend, racking up countless
astronomy
firsts from detailed mapping of the moon, Venus and Mars to the discovery
of planets outside the solar system.

Forty years ago, the Houston engineer just wanted to forecast weather in
the upper atmosphere.

Yet the idea Gordon struck upon, building a gargantuan dish to collect
faint energy waves from above, would lead him well beyond Earth's upper
atmosphere.

Last month his creation, the Arecibo radiotelescope, received dual
recognition from two major engineering groups, an honor bestowed upon only
five projects
worldwide over the last century.

Perhaps most surprising for a telescope that predates the Apollo and Gemini
space programs, it remains the largest such instrument in the world. If you
flipped the Astrodome and doubled its size, you could begin to grasp the
size of the massive dish nestled into a large limestone sinkhole near Arecibo,
Puerto Rico. The landmark telescope has added to its fame by starring in
such 1990s films as GoldenEye and Contact.

The Arecibo dish is big enough to both emit the strongest and receive the
weakest radio waves, which are longer than visible lightwaves and so named
because
they have similar wavelengths to audible sound.

Radio waves are so faint a massive collector is needed to detect signals
from distant objects. The biggest dish, thus, yields the best astronomical
discoveries.

The Arecibo telescope has also been used to bounce signals off nearby
planets, much as a submarine uses radar to ping objects. In recent years
the Arecibo
dish has peered well beyond our solar system, both at distant planets and
even finding use by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program, or
SETI.

"The telescope is simultaneously the most powerful radar and most sensitive
receiver we have," said Paul Cloutier, a Rice University professor of physics
and astronomy. "In one sense, Arecibo put us in touch with the rest of the
galaxy.

"Bill Gordon, basically, invented the first long-distance telephone where
E.T. could phone home."

A traditional weather balloon can go up about 20 miles. In 1958, scientists
could determine the temperature, pressure and wind direction of the atmosphere
up to about 150 or 200 miles.

Yet with missiles increasingly probing the atmosphere a thousand or more
miles higher, and satellites and manned rockets soon to follow, scientists and
defense experts were interested in conditions in the much higher altitudes.

Additionally, to communicate over long distances and around Earth's curved
surface, radio signals were being bounced from one ground-based antenna off
"bubbles"
in this unstudied region of Earth's atmosphere to other antennas.

Gordon, now 83, calculated how big a dish it would take to measure
properties 2,000 miles up. He hoped to observe the behavior of clouds of
electrons, the
particles that orbit an atom's nucleus. The speed of an electron, for
instance, indicates temperature.

This is a technical challenge somewhat like observing a golf ball orbiting
Pluto.

His answer for the size of dish he would need to make such minute
detections, with a diameter of 1,000 feet, seemed almost an impossibility.
The biggest
radiotelescope at the time was just 150 feet across.

The only likely source of funding was the Defense Department's new Advanced
Research Projects Agency, which at the time funded basic research initiatives
that didn't necessarily have to show military merit.

"They were having a hard time believing me because this idea of observing
the scattering of electrons was new," Gordon said. "They didn't know whether I
was a crackpot or whether I really had something."

But these were rough and tumble times in U.S. foreign policy and space
exploration, with the upper atmosphere emerging as a front line. U.S. Navy
spies
were experimenting with large dishes to pick up faint Soviet radio signals
that were bounced back to Earth by the moon. Long-range radar monitoring
systems
were being built to detect Soviet missiles. The Soviet Union had just
launched Sputnik.

Gordon, then a Cornell University electrical engineer, struck at the right
time. By 1963, five years after he conceived the telescope, the $10 million
government-funded
telescope opened for business.

By comparison, the largest optical telescope of the day, the 200-inch
telescope at Palomar Observatory, had taken 21 years to complete after
astronomers
received a private grant in 1928.

"It all happened incredibly fast," said Cornell engineering professor
Donald Thorn Farley Jr., then a graduate student at the school. "Things
don't happen
that fast today. Nowadays it could take years just to go through the
peer-review process, let alone begin building something."

The speed is all the more impressive considering the technical challenges
Gordon and the other Cornell engineers faced.

To detect Soviet radio signals the Navy had begun building a 600-foot dish
in the late 1950s. But this dish collapsed under its own weight. The trouble
arose as Navy engineers were trying to build a movable dish that could
follow objects in the sky as Earth rotated. But they could not design a
dish both
rigid enough to collect a stable signal and light enough to move. The Navy
eventually scrapped the project.

Gordon and his colleagues decided they must anchor their dish to the
ground. But they were faced with a similar dilemma: a typical
parabola-shaped dish,
which focuses incoming light to a point, would not allow scientists to
track planets and other objects.

So the engineers turned to a spherical dish design, which focuses light
along a line that could sway to partially follow objects. The design was
still experimental
at the time; the largest working model was 10 feet across.

"We were taking a pretty big leap," Gordon recalled.

While combating these engineering problems, the team also needed to find a
site. Gordon turned to a colleague, Don Belcher, who had helped locate a site
for the new Brazilian capital, Brasilia. The telescope required a site near
the equator to have the best view of the planets.

Belcher said Cuba was the best option, followed by Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
Luckily, given Cuba's present political disposition toward the United States,
Gordon had mentored a Puerto Rican engineer who agreed to help them with
the politics of placing a U.S. facility there.

After several flights over the country, and plenty of walks through
tropical woods, Gordon stumbled onto a large farm near the city of Arecibo
that he recognized
from the aerial photographs as a possible site.

"There was tobacco growing all over this large bowl in the ground, and it
would still be there if we hadn't picked the site," he said.

That was 1958, the same year he dreamed up the telescope. A year later a
formal land survey was done. Construction began in 1960 and was finished three
years later.

When it opened, the telescope proved immediately useful for measuring space
weather, including surges in the solar wind, which cause the aurora borealis.
It would help satellite designers better protect their equipment.

Scientists, too, were able to understand what they were up against when
sending missiles, satellites and people into space, Gordon said.

The Arecibo telescope soon would garner more fame as a tool for
astronomers, however. It detected ice on Mercury and made an accurate
measurement of the
small planet's rotation. In 1974 two scientists, Russell A. Hulse and
Joseph H. Taylor Jr., made important observations that confirmed an
important prediction
by the theory of relativity. Their work earned them a Nobel Prize in 1993.

Today, after major upgrades in 1974 and 1997 that sharpened the telescope's
focus, it is used for tasks such as finding potential landing sites on Mars
and sniffing out asteroids that might pose a threat to Earth.

"The telescope was very good in 1963 when we turned it on," Gordon said.
"But it has grown better and better throughout the last 40 years. It has gotten
about 10 times more sensitive every 10 years.

"That, I think, is the hardest thing to believe, but it's true. That's what
I am most proud of. We originally wanted it to last 10 years."

His peers have recognized this accomplishment as well.

In November, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers gave the
telescope its Milestone award. At the same ceremony, the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers presented Arecibo its Landmark award.

Only five projects, including the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and
the Japanese bullet train, have jointly received both awards.

Colleagues say what stands out about Gordon is his ability to think like
both a scientist, who can come up with an idea to study, and an engineer,
who can
then conceive and build the device needed to investigate.

"This is sort of like Galileo, who refined the telescope, and then used it
to make discoveries," Cloutier said.

Gordon didn't always want to be an engineer.

In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in meteorology.

That eventually turned into an assignment investigating why radars, then
still a relatively ill-understood technology, sometimes could see targets only
a few miles away and other times hundreds of miles away.

He ended up at the University of Texas studying the atmospheric problems
that caused these radio discrepancies.

An electrical engineer there convinced Gordon to follow him to Cornell to
complete his degrees.

After completing the telescope, Gordon and his family spent two years in
the remote hills of Puerto Rico.

Upon returning to Cornell he was pursued by Kenneth Pitzer, then Rice's
president, to become dean of science and engineering.

Although Gordon's daughter was unimpressed with Houston -- her averse
reaction was due in part to the flat landscape, he fondly recalls -- Gordon
took the
opportunity because he believed Pitzer was building Rice into a top
research university.

As dean from 1966 to 1976, Gordon helped legitimize Rice's space physics
department, sending dozens of graduate students to Arecibo for research. He
retired
in 1986 as a professor emeritus, and now visits Arecibo, he says, only for
parties.

"I still think it's a dream, sometimes, until I look at it," he said. "But
then, I think I know how dreams become reality.

"Through engineers."
*** End of Houston Chronicle article ***

This is another vivid illustration of the remarkable people who
volunteer at Taping For The Blind, Inc!

We wish you and your family a happy and prosperous new year!

RLB