June 08 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine

Scanning the sky robotically

Lab's 'robodoc' adds an exciting twist to astronomy research

Tom Vestrand poses with RAPTOR-T, four co-aligned telescopes with insertable color filters. Part of the Lab's robotic telescope system, RAPTOR-T will be the first to observe gamma-ray bursts in four different color bands while the gamma rays are being emitted. Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez

He's been tinkering with gadgets for as long as he can remember, from hot-rodding the lawn mower to rebuilding a Ford 8 N tractor engine in an upstairs bedroom. Now, Tom Vestrand of Space Science and Applications has taken on a higher calling with a decade's worth of robotized telescopes up on Fenton Hill, scanning the heavens with a methodical efficiency no human can match.

"In the second grade, my grandparents bought a telescope and a microscope for me, and I just did stuff. I've always been interested in science," Vestrand said. Growing up in the rust-belt suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, he found plenty of things to take apart, and it blended with a family tradition of fiddling with things. His father, grandfather, and great grandfather worked for Burroughs, the longtime adding-machine company, and his father also worked for a computer company. He spent a little time in the Burroughs facility himself, working on the janitorial crew during summer breaks, giving him a solid motivation to continue his studies.

Heading to the University of Michigan for a bachelor of science in physics, and then completing a doctorate in astronomy at the University of Maryland, Vestrand moved on to a postdoctoral position at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and then to work on satellite instrumentation for some years at the University of New Hampshire. Coming to Los Alamos 10 years ago, he was ready to do things no one else had yet accomplished, combining robots with telescopes to give the skies a really thorough going over.

The best part of his science, he says, is "that feeling of excitement you get when you put together something no one else has put together before. It's that 'Aha!' moment. 'That's how it works.' "

The Fenton Hill telescopes, which Vestrand says represent "a really different way of doing optical astronomy," are part of the Thinking Telescope project (see the article in the January issue of 1663, available online at http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/1663/d/20081).

"The thing we did differently on thinking telescopes was to see that the next step was to go for triggers in the optical, that there could be these really spectacular explosions that are not gamma-ray-burst generated, and that you need robots to really scan the skies."

—Nancy Ambrosiano