As owner-employees, our goal is always to serve our customers with aloha — because happy people build better communities... and that, is something to be proud of. Mahalo Hawai‘i for 95 years of trust and support! Building Hawaii Since 1921 NASA Infrared Telescope Facility Deputy Director Bob Bus points to the telescope’s instruments. gone through the program from participating schools across the state since its launch in 2015. But few step foot into an actual telescope. These days, a small crew is usually all that’s needed to run a telescope at night, allowing astronomers to do their part remotely. “I work from my kitchen table all the time down in Hilo,” said Bob Bus, NASA IRTF deputy director. “You can actually get a PhD in astronomy without going to a telescope.” The students’ trip to the observatory was the last night of three they spent viewing Titan and collecting data. The other two were done at CFHT headquarters in Waimea, Laychak said. Built in 1979, the box-shaped NASA IRTF is one of the oldest on the mountain. The building has a metallic-looking dome, the top of which rotates to allow the 3-meter telescope to find its targets. The light is reflected from the primary mirror to a smaller secondary mirror at top of the telescope structure that sends the photons into one of the instruments attached at the telescope’s base. Before they begin their observing, which lasts about two hours, Bus HOLLYN JOHNSON/Tribune-Herald gives the students a tour of the dome as well as advice on how to work in the lower oxygen environment. (Tip: food helps, and doughnuts, which they brought with them, taste better at higher altitude). Bus said the telescope, owned by NASA but ran by the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was built to assist the space agency’s spacecraft missions, a role it still fills to this day with the recent Cassini mission. While the spacecraft provides the closeups, the ground-based telescope captures the baseline data of Earth’s neighbors to help NASA understand what it is seeing. “It’s like watching a really long soap opera for many, many years to put into context that one scene,” Bus said, while describing the telescope’s work. When it’s not studying planets and moons, the observatory is discovering smaller objects, such as asteroids, many of which he gets to name. Pictures of planets taken by NASA spacecraft line the walls of the telescope’s control room, 16 Sunday, December 24, 2017 SCHOLARS From page 15 “We had a couple moons in mind and we narrowed it down to Titan mainly because of the atmosphere. We’re looking for something that can show us evidence there has been life.” — Marie-Claire, senior See SCHOLARS Page 18 Hawaii Tribune-Herald
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