Columbia physicist earns prestigious honor

When people hear he's a specialist in attitude adjustment, they're likely to think he works for Tony Soprano instead of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, F. Landis Markley says.

But the attitudes he actually adjusts are those of spacecraft, attitude being the spacecraft's orientation up or down, he explains.

And so well has he done this job through the years that the American Astronautical Society is honoring him with the F. Landis Markley Astronautics Symposium, to be held June 29-July 2 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Golf Resort, Spa and Marina, in Cambridge, on the Eastern Shore.

Like the old saying about having to ask how much something costs, if you have to ask what it's all about or don't know Markley's achievements, you haven't got the right stuff to attend.

Among the professional papers to be presented, Markley will be giving an address of his own, titled "Lessons Learned" after NASA's customary review of mistakes to avoid their repetition. But he'll be talking about his areas of interest, the people he's collaborated with, computational methods and, of course, space exploration.

The 34-year Columbia resident found the "new city" ideal appealing when he came to the area to write software for NASA at Computer Sciences Corp., and chose the Longfellow neighborhood in Harper's Choice so his daughter could attend its highly-reputed schools (he now lives in Wilde Lake's Byrant Woods neighborhood).

He joined the U.S. Naval Research Lab in 1978 and to Goddard in 1985, over the decades being involved in more than 20 space missions.

Those pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as seen, among other places, at a mind-blowing exhibit running at the Walters Art Museum? Thank Markley, who in 1999 literally saved the telescope when its camera-controlling gyros started failing, maintaining it pointed at the sun for power for 38 days until a service mission could reach it, says Julie Thienel, a former colleague at NASA Goddard who is the symposium's local organizer.

But not all spacecraft are focused on the heavens. Markley also worked on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, an earth-observing satellite launched jointly with the Japanese Space Agency in 1997.

The most exciting project he has been involved with has been the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe, launched in 2001. The probe looks at radiation left over from the Big Bang. Markley worked on "the engineering side of things" in collaboration with scientists from Princeton. Combined with data from Hubble, WMAP's information has enabled calculation of the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years.

Although he's long been involved in the exploration of space, Markley never had dreams of becoming an astronaut himself. "I'm not a terribly adventurous guy," he admits.

His career began with an undergraduate degree in engineering physics from Cornell in 1962 and a doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, followed by an assistant professorship at Williams College in Massachusetts. But not earning tenure sent him out of academics and into industry, back to engineering again.

"I can't think of anything I wish I had done," he says. "Do I regret not getting tenure? No, my life turned out very well."

Apparently so. It's not often that someone has a symposium organized in his name, according to Thienel, who was mentored by Markley at Goddard for 22 years until she left to teach at the Naval Academy. It's an honor limited to "a few of the really big names in the field," and in this case, "a remarkable and very nice man, too."

Even though Markley contemplates retirement in the fall after Hubble's last servicing mission set for October -- "kind of a nice closure on a long relationship with a spacecraft," he puts it -- his work will go on in Hubble's successor, the James Webb space telescope, currently scheduled to launch in 2013, and in LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which (if all goes well and it actually is eventually launched) will attempt to use gravity waves, rather than light, to see the very fabric of space itself. While Albert Einstein proposed the existence of gravity waves and ground instruments are looking for them, no one has yet detected them, Markley adds.

In any case, don't expect him to retire to Bali, as did his own mentor, Gene Lefferts.

Goddard offers an emeritus program wherein retired employees can apply to work on whatever projects interest them. "The only thing is," Markley notes, "you don't get paid."

But he's a guy who, out of all the Hubble images, is most moved by the "Deep Field" shot, taken by someone who used his limited allotment of time to aim the scope at an area of space considered empty and came away with a black background "covered with little squiggly things," thousands of galaxies almost as old as the universe itself. Money, like the sure shot, clearly isn't everything.

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