Here’s a taste of the extraordinary work being done in the UA
College of Science.
Steward Observatory Mirror Lab
Some of the most innovative telescope mirrors in the world are
crafted in the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab beneath Arizona
Stadium.
In the 1980s, UA astronomy professor Roger Angel and his team
pioneered the idea of building honeycombed mirrors that were lighter,
cheaper and more temperature-sensitive than solid mirrors. The lab’s
mirrors—as large as 8.4 meters across—have been used in the
Large Binocular Telescope atop Mount Graham, the Multiple Mirror
Telescope on Mount Hopkins and the Giant Magellan Telescope under
construction in Chile, among others.
Angel now wants to use that same ingenuity to reduce the cost of
solar energy.
“Now the mirror lab is getting engaged in the technology to create
cheap mirrors for solar energy, in order to make it more competitive
with coal,” says Joaquin Ruiz, dean of the UA College of Science.
“Roger is looking at the next-generation, solar-energy factory, if you
want to look at it that way, in which mirrors focus the solar energy
into photo-voltaic cells, increasing the amount of energy the
photo-voltaic cells can produce. It’s all being done by a group that is
expert at that sort of thing: the astronomers.”
Want to see more? Tours of the Mirror Lab can be arranged by calling
626-8792.
The Phoenix Mars Mission
The Phoenix Mars Mission captured headlines for months last year,
after a team from the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab worked with NASA, the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other universities to put a robotic lab
on the surface of Mars to search for traces of water. Between its
landing on Memorial Day weekend and early November, the plucky probe
transmitted photographs and data on the soil and atmosphere that
researchers are still sifting through. Last month, four papers about
the mission were published in Science. In one, Phoenix principal
investigator Peter Smith and 36 co-authors examined the likelihood that
the landing area once had a thin film of water on its surface, which
“implies that this region could have previously met the criteria for
habitability.”
The HiRISE Camera
Since March 2006, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment
aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been beaming pictures of
Mars back to Earth. The camera is the brainchild of Alfred McEwen of
the Lunar and Planetary Lab, who leads the team that controls the
camera from here on Earth and examines the photos as they are beamed
back to the UA. Each week, a new batch of dazzling photos is loaded
onto the HiRISE Web site (hirise.lpl.arizona.edu) for the
public to view.
Tumamoc Hill
Many Tucsonans just enjoy the hike to the top of Tumamoc Hill, but
it’s also home to a research lab that has been studying the surrounding
860 acres of desert for more than a century. First established by the
Carnegie Foundation in 1903, the lab is considered one of the
birthplaces of modern ecological science.
“Tumamoc shows what happens to the desert when the city encroaches
on it,” says Ruiz. “There’s a tremendous history of observations at
Tumamoc Hill that will help inform us of what’s going to happen to
cities in the future as they grow bigger.”
Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research
Since 1937, scientists at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research have
been studying sections of trees to better understand the earth’s
ecology. The lab’s director, Thomas Swetnam, is an expert on forest
health.
Malcolm Hughes, a regents’ professor of dendrochronology who works
in the lab, has studied changes in climate dating back centuries.
Hughes was one of three authors of a study that produced the so-called
“hockey-stick graph,” which shows a dramatic increase in Northern
Hemisphere temperatures in the last 100 years.
“That graph is shown in almost every document on climate change,”
says Ruiz. “The tree-ring lab was one of the places where the key
observations about the reality of global climate change were
discovered.
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2009.
