It’s hard to top the adventure of being stranded for nine months at the South Pole in order to take the best seat on Earth for watching the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slamming into Jupiter.
But a University of Chicago astronomer who is sending back amazing photographs of the celestial collision from his deep-frozen polar base figures his life was even more adventurous when he was 17 years old.
That was in 1981, when Nguyen Trong Hien and an older brother said goodbye to their parents and boarded a 60-foot boat with 59 of their countrymen to escape from Vietnam.
Since then he has been on a grand journey that is perhaps peculiar to the late 20th Century, marred by violence and repression and blessed by breathtaking advances in knowledge and technology.
It has taken him from defeated South Vietnam to a refugee camp in Hong Kong and eventual resettlement in California. Starting in a junior college, he graduated with a degree in physics from Berkeley and, last year, earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University.
“I finally left (Vietnam) because of the promise of a good education,” Nguyen said Tuesday in an interview via a computer hookup between Chicago and his South Pole laboratory. “The risks we faced at the time were not great enough to stop us.
“At the worst, I knew that I would end up in prison or in a shark’s stomach out in the Pacific Ocean. I was only 17. What did I know?”
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Nguyen so impressed the Princeton faculty that his mentors there urged the University of Chicago to hire him for its SPIREX (South Pole Infrared Explorer) project in Antarctica.
Chicago scientists last year built an ultra-sophisticated, prototypical, 24-inch infrared telescope and installed it at the South Pole.
The telescope is the first of a series of ever-larger and more efficient infrared telescopes the Chicago team plans to build in the next several years. Needing an astrophysicist to operate it through the 1994 Antarctic winter, from January through November, they chose Nguyen.
On Wednesday, Nguyen was busily recording what his colleagues in Chicago have dubbed a “Four-Peat Bull’s-Eye,” four comet fragments hitting Jupiter in the same spot over a 17-hour period. The first two happened in rapid succession about 3 p.m. Wednesday, the third about 12:30 a.m. Thursday, the fourth was expected at 10 a.m.
Because of the timing, only a few earthbound observatories in Africa and Hawaii are expected to get a view of any of the collisions. Weather permitting, SPIREX will see all four.
SPIREX is one of several ultra-sophisticated machines being tested at the base to search the far reaches of the universe for clues to the origin of stars and galaxies.
They are being designed and built by the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica, headquartered at the university’s observatory in Williams Bay, Wis.
Technologies such as SPIREX work best in a pristinely “quiet” environment, one as far away as possible from distractions to the machines, such as sound, heat and light. No place on Earth is more pristine than the South Pole.
“Our telescope measures the light of things that are warm,” said Mark Hereld, the principal scientist for SPIREX, “so it helps to have it someplace that is cold.”
On Tuesday night, Nguyen checked the outside temperature at the Pole. It was minus 83 degrees Fahrenheit. With a 12-knot wind, the windchill factor was 140 degrees below zero.
The base camp is in a domed building less than 100 yards from the actual South Pole. But the delicate scientific equipment is in a building called the “Dark Sector” about a mile away, separated from artificial light and the noise of the camp’s diesel generators.
The long winters of total darkness are the greatest asset of the polar outpost for scientists peering into the heavens, but they also make manning the polar camp hazardous. The crew of 27 is brought in by ski plane in January. Because it is too risky for planes to land in the dark, they can’t leave until November.
That means the camp has to be completely self-sufficient for nine months. Indeed, only six of the 27 are scientists. The rest are support staff, including a doctor, mechanics to keep the life-giving generators running, and cooks, carpenters and technicians.
One man works full time, for example, mining snow near the camp and bringing it in to be melted for water, 200 gallons per day per person. That is barely enough for each person to have one, two-minute “Navy” shower a week.
“These machines are so complex,” Hereld said. “I couldn’t find six people to send down there who would collectively have sufficient knowledge to operate and maintain our telescope.”
Instead, Hereld and a half-dozen scientists in Chicago work closely with Nguyen in Antarctica by computer, giving him instructions much like a ground crew does with an astronaut.
SPIREX was going to Antarctica long before the impending collision of the comet and Jupiter was discovered, so watching the collision has been a bonus for the Chicago team. Being positioned in Antarctica, it is the only telescope on Earth or in space with a constant view of Jupiter.
“We came into this week expecting there would not be much to see,” Hereld said. “Nobody thought (the collisions) would be so spectacular.”
SPIREX’s pictures, unlike optical telescopes, are of the heat generated during the impacts. That alone will give scientists different and valuable data.
Nguyen has been working almost around the clock, occasionally relieved by other scientists.
“Here,” he said, “it is very quiet and peaceful as I watch the spectacular explosions.”
Last December, Nguyen returned to Vietnam for the first time, visiting his now elderly parents in Danang. He tried to explain to them the work he would be doing in Antarctica.
“My mom and dad actually had a hard time to understand where Antarctica is,” he said. “All they know is that it’s really cold.”
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His father, he said, proffered one bit of parental advice: “Try to get another job after this one, son.”