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LSST E-News

LSST E-News

April 2013  •  Volume 6 Number 1

Bill Gressler: Seeking Thrills with Roller Coasters, Fly Balls, and LSST

LSST’s Telescope and Site subsystem manager, William Gressler. Image credit: LSSTC

The fateful discovery of the “Institute of Optics” page in the University of Rochester Catalog transformed aspiring biomedical engineer William Gressler into an optical engineer and eventually LSST’s Telescope and Site subsystem manager. “The irony is that if the pages had been stuck together or I had missed that page,” Bill said, “who knows where I’d be now.”

Without that moment of serendipity, he wouldn’t be leading the team responsible for design and fabrication of the LSST observatory facilities and hardware that will capture the light, control the survey, calibrate conditions, and support all LSST summit and base operations. He certainly wouldn’t have met Mick Jagger, to whom he gave a late night tour of the Hobby Eberly Telescope (HET) while working at that facility.

“Who knows who I’ll meet as LSST moves along?” Bill said. “I find it fascinating to look back and realize that a kid from Mohawk, New York, population 2,700 with all of three traffic lights, can work his way up to participating in such an important science project as the LSST.”

Bill took over as LSST Telescope and Site manager in July 2012, just as the subsystem began preparing for early procurements in advance of LSST’s construction start. Along with ongoing LSST mirror fabrication at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, the recently awarded M2 polishing and cell assembly contract was the culmination of Bill’s nearly seven years as lead optical systems engineer before assuming his current position. He joined the LSST project in 2005 following a stint at Kodak/ITT in New York. Before that he worked with LSST Project Manager Victor Krabbendam on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in west Texas.

“These telescope projects are interesting and rewarding,” Bill said. “While the LSST Project dwarfs the HET in its size, cost, and significance, the approaches to leading a lean team to design, fabricate, assemble, and demonstrate performance of a telescope system are similar. They provide a unique opportunity to produce a tangible legacy for future scientific discovery.”

Bill takes pride in the role his discipline plays in enabling amazing science through the provision of telescope capabilities.

“Just as images, alerts, and catalog data will benefit astronomy and astrophysics, innovations in the LSST telescope system will benefit future telescope and camera design engineers,” he said.

Many of the basic technologies such as active optics, hexapod positioning, and wavefront reconstruction have been demonstrated on previous telescopes, but LSST is pushing the envelope through the melding of many of these features into a unique implementation.

“Our combined M1/M3 (primary/tertiary mirror) design is truly state of the art. The extremely fast optical system prescription and wide field of view combine to provide an unmatched collection capability. Our cadence is very demanding given the size and mass of the optical system, which required re-design of legacy support systems.”

In his free time, Bill enjoys baseball, traveling, and spending time with his wife, two kids and “super dog” Tanner. Over three years of going to Arizona Diamondbacks games, he and his family have accumulated six foul balls, including two in one game (one in the mitt!). While on vacation this past summer in San Antonio, he experienced his first “big dose” of amusement park rides at Six Flags over Texas. Bill said he barely made it through the Rattler, a nearly mile-long wooden roller coaster that starts with a 166-foot drop, has a top speed of 65 mph, and pulls riders with up to 3.5 g through its curves. The Rattler closed for good shortly after the Gressler family vacation. As far as we know, there is no direct connection. Bill looks forward to its replacement with the Iron Rattler, a taller, faster metal roller coaster that will be the first of its kind with a completely inverted barrel roll.

As exciting as Bill may find catching foul balls and thrill rides to be, he is equally excited about LSST’s promise of discovery.

“I find the scale of the Universe to be a little incomprehensible quite frankly,” Bill said. “As an engineer, I cannot fully appreciate the magnitude or enormity of data we’ll collect, but I can relate to this fact: by the third night, LSST will have captured as much data as has been produced to date by the Hubble telescope. That’s pretty mind boggling. And I expect we’ll make thrilling discoveries that will draw the same gasps as those amazing deep-field images from Hubble.”

Article written by Robert McKercher and Bill Gressler.

 

LSST is a public-private partnership. Funding for design and development activity comes from the National Science Foundation, private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSSTC Institutional Members:

Adler Planetarium; Argonne National Laboratory; Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL); California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Chile; Cornell University; Drexel University; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; George Mason University; Google, Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Institut de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3); Johns Hopkins University; Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) – Stanford University; Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL); Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL); National Optical Astronomy Observatory; National Radio Astronomy Observatory; Princeton University; Purdue University; Research Corporation for Science Advancement; Rutgers University; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Space Telescope Science Institute; Texas A & M University; The Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California at Davis; University of California at Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Michigan; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington; Vanderbilt and Fisk Universities

LSST E-News Team:

  • Suzanne Jacoby (Editor-in-Chief)
  • Robert McKercher (Staff Writer)
  • Mark Newhouse (Design & Production: Web)
  • Emily Acosta (Design & Production: PDF/Print)
  • Sidney Wolff (Editorial Consultant)
  • Additional contributors as noted

LSST E-News is a free email publication of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project. It is for informational purposes only, and the information is subject to change without notice.

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