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| Anderson, MESSENGER Deputy Project Scientist |
The fact that a mind-boggling array of mathematics and physics undergirds the planetary observation plans for MESSENGER’s operations when it enters Mercury’s orbit in 2011 is no drawback to the man behind the orbital strategy, an individual who has always been attracted to hard problems.
“When I was in high school, the textbook word problems bored me,” says MESSENGER's Deputy Project Scientist Brian Anderson. “When the teacher would issue these word problems, I realized that the hard part was not finding the answer. The hard part was figuring out what’s the right question. So I’d spend my time developing my own hard questions, and then answer those.”
For instance, if you know how many sheets of paper towels are in a roll, how thick is each sheet? Or, observing a tanker truck on a road trip: how many gallons does that truck hold, how much does it weigh, and how big are the footprints of the tires on the road? “From a very early age, I was more interested in asking the question first, not following recipes to answer somebody else’s questions.”
Anderson’s parents encouraged this type of independent thinking, he says. He recalls his father, a speech communications professor, dissecting the motives behind commercials. “We would be watching TV, see a commercial, and he would critique it, saying things like ‘what they are not telling you is this’ and ‘that’s a meaningless statement.’”
“My two brothers and I thought it was hilarious at the time, but we were learning valuable lessons in critical thinking,” he says. “Our parents encouraged us, from a very early age, to think for ourselves.”
Following this bent for spotting interesting questions and critical thinking, he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics, mathematics, and religion from Augsburg College in 1982. “Physics and religion? Isn’t that an oxymoron? That’s what most people think”, Anderson says, “but the physical sciences are the way we understand nature objectively, and religion is how we find meaning to actually go about our lives.”
“Physics and math are basically problem solving formalized with precise and rigorous logic” he continues. “Religion deals with the hard experiences of living as a human being and is a discipline of applying rigorous and critical thinking to bear on the key questions of meaning and purpose. Both areas need rigor and critical thinking.”
Anderson went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1987. “I first took physics because my older brother had taken it, and he had a powerful influence on me,” he says. “But it soon became clear that I was good at it. It just came to me naturally,” he said. “I developed an aptitude for working with experiments and, through understanding the physics, improving and moving beyond what might have been in the test or instructions.”
Some of his earliest professional work involved research in magnetospheric physics analyzing magnetometer data from the Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorers/Charge Composition Explorer mission under a subcontract with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).
After joining APL in 1988, Anderson worked on a number of missions, including the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission as instrument scientist for the magnetometer, an experience that he says fed into his desire to solve “really hard problems.” NEAR was not designed to be magnetically clean, so “it was an incredibly difficult problem to remove contamination signals from the data, but we did manage to get real science out of the magnetometer, and people didn’t think we could do that,” he says.
His success with that mission was one reason he was sought for the same role on MESSENGER. “In this case, the challenge was to make the spacecraft magnetically clean to ensure that once MESSENGER is in orbit around Mercury, the magnetometer will detect only the natural magnetic field of the planet — so we wouldn’t have to remove any signals due to the spacecraft.”
For two years Anderson worked with the engineering team, measuring all of the magnetic components used in the spacecraft, identifying all sources of magnetic signals in the spacecraft, and developing the right approach to reduce magnetic signals. The solar panels, battery, and power system are wired to ensure that the spacecraft power system doesn’t generate magnetic fields. The spinning momentum wheels are shielded magnetically to ensure that their magnetic field is insignificant. The propulsion valves include strong magnets, and the team had to figure out what magnets were needed and where to put them on the spacecraft to cancel out their magnetic field as well.
Once that was done and the spacecraft was successfully launched and on its way, the MESSENGER program managers needed someone with Anderson’s technical expertise to head up the advance science planning for MESSENGER’s orbital phase. After two years of working with a talented team of engineers and scientists, and more than two years before the scheduled orbit insertion, the team has a fully sequenced orbital plan in place.
Despite the demands of his scientific career and the MESSENGER program, Anderson, continues to pursue study in classical music as a lyric baritone. He started singing at a young age and continued as a high school student at Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis. “The conductor of the Minnehaha Singers was Harry Opel, an excellent bass baritone, and he was a very powerful influence for me, instilling a love of music and performance,” he says. Anderson studied voice in college and continues to study at the Johns Hopkins University Peabody Preparatory. He’s been studying three years now at Peabody, and he’s won a number of competitions. Still, there are no regrets that he didn’t choose this option as a career.
“No question, I did the right thing. I’m a natural at physics and science, not music,” says Anderson, 49. “I’m getting a lot of satisfaction out of singing, while also doing my bit to advance understanding through my work on various science projects. MESSENGER is especially exciting because it is literally a new frontier in human exploration.”
by Paulette Campbell, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
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