Disaster & Regeneration
American physicist and astronomer Penny Sackett undertook her studies and research in the United States and Netherlands in the 1980s and 1990s at a time when female physicists were few and far between. Sackett describes the men’s locker room mentality prevalent at the time…
“I remember particularly once a famous scientist coming to visit when I was in graduate school, and the male graduate students were asked to go out to dinner with him, but I was asked to babysit one of the faculty’s children so that he could go.” (Bhathal, Sutherland & Butcher, 2014).
Sackett became Director at Stromlo in 2002, although she had previously undertaken a sabbatical at the Anglo-Australian Observatory (ATT) at Siding Spring. Her special interests were the research of extrasolar planets and Magellanic Clouds.
Barely six months into her tenure, the unimaginable occurred. On 18 January 2003, fires that were burning in the Brindabella and Namadgi National Parks for over a week, reached the south-west suburbs of Canberra, having a catastrophic impact on the area, killing four people and destroying over 500 homes.
Mount Stromlo Observatory was decimated, with the workshops, administration building, library, eight staff homes and seven telescopes all destroyed. Among the equipment destroyed was the $5 million Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrograph (NIFS) which was undergoing the final stages of testing prior to shipment to Hawaii’s Gemini North Telescope. The only telescope not destroyed was the Farnham Telescope, built in 1886 and installed at the observatory in 1928.
Such was the resilience of the Stromlo team, many were back at work the next day and three weeks after the fire, they returned to the Observatory. However, rebuilding efforts were severely hampered by conflict with the University’s insurers and the subsequent lack of money to fund reconstruction despite the University and Federal Government channelling millions into the project. One of the first priorities was to rebuild the specialist workshops, which led to the construction of a new Advanced Instrumentation Technology Centre, which opened in 2006. One of the earliest projects undertaken in the Centre was the construction of a new Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrograph (NIFS) to replace the one destroyed in the 2003 fires. Designed and built by the Canberra-based Auspace Ltd and Mount Stromlo Observatory, the NIFS was shipped to Hawaii in August 2005 and used to undertake important work relating to young stellar wind speeds and black hole masses. Additionally, Stromlo staff built the Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager for the Gemini South 8m Telescope in Chile and the Wide Field Spectrograph for Siding Spring Observatory.
In 2005 approval was given to construct a new state-of-the-art SkyMapper Telescope, to be installed at Siding Spring. SkyMapper's mission is to robotically create a unique digital survey of the entire southern sky, producing a massively detailed record of nearly a billion stars and galaxies, to a sensitivity one million times fainter than the human eye can see (ANU Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics).
Rather than simply rebuild what was lost during the 2003 bushfires, Sackett and her team focused on bold ideas for the future, including involvement in the world’s next very large optical telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The Stromlo team partnered with elite institutions in the United States including Harvard University and the Smithsonian, as well as a consortium of researchers from Brazil, Chile, Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan. The GMT is the most powerful telescope on Earth. It is 65 metres tall and is 200 times more powerful than the best telescopes in the world today.
An important legacy of the early 2000s and Sackett’s directorship at Stromlo was the Observatory’s research output, and during her tenure Stromlo staff published more than 500 papers in international journals. The team was also successful at winning close to $3 million in Australian Research Council funding. Ground-breaking research was undertaken by P.A. Price, Brian Schmidt, Ken Freeman, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Mike Bessell, John Norris, Anna Frebel, Helmut Jerjen, Penny Sackett and many others, including the completion of 10,000 giant galaxies in the nearby universe with an international team of astronomers, and the discovery of a cool planet of 5.5 Earth masses through gravitational lensing (Bhathal, Sutherland & Butcher, 2014).
Sackett completed her five-year term as Director in 2007 and subsequently stepped down to take up the position of Australia’s Chief Scientist, the first woman to be appointed to this role.
