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View Professor John Carver (1926-2004) photo gallery
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Professor John Carver was interviewed in 1997 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Carver's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers his initial work with rockets and the launching of Australia's first satellite from its own site. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
John Carver was born in Sydney in 1926. He received a BSc in 1947 and an MSc in 1948 from the University of Sydney. He was awarded an Australian National University (ANU) PhD scholarship and spent from 1949 to 1953 at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where he worked on photodisintegration of the deuteron (the nucleus of a deuterium atom consisting of one neutron and one proton). He received a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1953.
From 1953 to 1961 Carver worked at the then Research School of Physical Sciences of the ANU. During this time he worked as a Research Fellow, Fellow and Senior Fellow in the School. His work during this period was in experimental nuclear physics, particularly nuclear photodisintegration.
In 1961 Carver was appointed Elder Professor and Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Adelaide, a position he held until 1978. It was here that his involvement with space-related research began. Working collaboratively with the government facilities at Woomera, he developed scientific rocket payloads to study the absorption of radiation in the atmosphere and the evolution of the Earth's atmosphere more generally. In 1967 he provided the scientific payload for WRESAT, the first Australian satellite, launched from Woomera.
Carver returned to the ANU as professor of physics and Director of the Research School of Physical Sciences in 1978, a position from which he retired in 1992. During his time in this position he continued investigating space-related and ultraviolet physics and worked to develop strong links between the School and technology industries. Upon his retirement he was appointed Emeritus Professor and served the ANU as Deputy Vice-Chancellor and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies from 1993 to 1994. After this he continued his research as a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering.
In addition to his work within the academic world, Carver has contributed to a number of influential national and international bodies. He was appointed chairman of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 1970 and held the position until 1995. As part of this position he led the United Nations working group that set governing principles for the safe use of nuclear power sources in outer space. From 1977 to 1982 he was chairman of the Radio Research Board of Australia. He was chairman of the Anglo-Australian Telescope Board from 1983 to 1986. A long time member of the Australian Science, Technology and Engineering Council, he served as its deputy chair from 1981 to 1986.
In 1986 Carver was elected a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering. Also in 1986 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia. The International Council for Science's Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) awarded him the 2000 COSPAR International Cooperation Medal.
Rocket-borne experiments
What was the topic for your initial work with the rockets, and how did you select it? And is it true that the laboratory experiments were pretty well in tandem with the airborne or high-altitude ones?
I looked for simple things to do, and they were pretty simple. We took the absorption of ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere as the problem, because that was close to the sorts of things I understood, and I rationalised it a lot. The typical absorption thing was the Lyman-alpha radiation function. That radiation was very important because it is the fundamental line of the simplest atom and the dominant radiation when you’re off the Earth. Absorption of all those radiations into the Earth’s atmosphere, in the UV, is what starts off the photochemistry of the atmosphere and the whole plethora of problems that come from that. It was relatively simple to make some detectors. Initially we made Lyman-alpha detectors, which were very like the little Geiger counter I had set up – little cylinders with a rod in the middle and a window in the front. By varying the window and the gas we could make detectors which picked out particular bits of the UV.
The very first experiment we did was on the absorption in the atmosphere of Lyman-alpha radiation from the sun. That turned out nicely and gave a rather simple way of measuring the molecular oxygen density profile over a certain range in the atmosphere. The detectors we built for that – again like little versions of Geiger counters – were filled with a gas which provided one limit on the wavelength, and their window in the front could be varied from lithium fluoride or magnesium fluoride right up to quartz and sapphire, providing the other wavelength limit. So they were bandpass devices. We also built lots of ways of testing the detectors, taking a portable UV source up to the range to test them before they were flown in the rocket.
After a number of such experiments in the daylight, mainly getting molecular oxygen, we were very interested in doing similar experiments at night. We had a rather delightful set of experiments which used the full moon as the light source. Out of that we got the reflectivity of the moon in the UV, which was not very well known, and then using that we worked in the peak of the ozone band absorption, about 2500 Ångstroms, and we got ozone distributions at night, high in each tail. One reason for doing that at night was that light has to be very much in photochemical equilibrium and not dominated by transport as the ozone is lower down, particularly during the day.
We spent a few years on this program, doing a lot of experiments but not as many as I would have liked. I always tried to get seasonal and diurnal variations, but we could instrument only about five or six rockets a year – the limit of what the Salisbury people would fire for us. Ideally one would have liked to let off 20 rockets in one day; we never reached that level of power. But we made a lot of the measurements with Brian Rofe's group at WRE and got out a fair amount of data about UV radiation absorption in the Southern Hemisphere.
Not a Woomera failure at all: launching WRESAT 1
In about 1965-66 there was a big Redstone rocket left over from a Woomera program to study re-entry into the atmosphere, and the good-hearted Americans offered it to the Australians who had been working with them, saying that Australia could probably put a satellite in orbit with it. The WRE people at Salisbury said 'yes', and would I be prepared to provide the experimental package? I said of course we would. I knew we had some very good infrastructure as a basis for testing, including a big vacuum tank – big enough to hold the whole satellite – which I had got built with money from the ARC [Australian Research Council]. But after we’d all accepted, the Americans told us we had to do it all in 12 months because then they would have to go home. So Brian Horton and the rest of the university team worked very hard in collaboration with the Salisbury people, and it was all done in 12 months.
As usual I was up there for the launch. Going to launches of rockets is a funny business: most of the people who are there have strong emotional involvement with the rocket but can’t do anything at the time it is to be fired. On the day the rocket was scheduled for firing, the firing schedule went right down to the last minute but then had to be cancelled because things hadn’t worked quite as they should. Everything was put off to the following day and it was very disappointing to go home that night without having fired the rocket. And the press, who all had been there, called it another one of those Woomera failures. By the time we went out the next day, though, the American crew – a pretty tough lot of rednecks – had belted the rocket in a few places and it went off beautifully, with a great roar.
In those early days, 1967, we were the third country to launch our own satellite from our own site. We were front page on every newspaper in Australia. There was a wonderful feeling of delight when it went up. We were able to read the instruments from quite early on in the flight and we could see that everything was working, and then it came round again and you knew it really was in orbit!
Was anyone doing telemetry for you?
Oh yes. Loads of people around the world tracked it for us; we were able to collect data quite continually. And another marvellous thing was that people were so cooperative and friendly about it. Despite all the occasional criticism there has been of Defence Science, when they had this challenging thing to do in a defined time they were wonderful. They would break any rule and do anything to help. If you said you needed batteries to power the thing, and all the paperwork hadn’t gone through, they would nevertheless get them in from the States – and off it went. That was a great thrill and I was very pleased.
Were the scientific results up to what you hoped?
Yes. I would have liked even more data, of course. The flight lasted just a few days at about 200 or 300 kilometres, until eventually its battery power failed and it was brought down by atmospheric drag, doing a re-entry over Ireland.
Focus questions
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
atmosphere
Lyman-alpha radiation
ozone
photochemistry
rocket
satellite
ultraviolet radiation
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