By Susan de Castro McCann

Redstone Review Editor

LYONS – In this case it is rocket science.

Marty Gould, a self-employed machinist, recently completed some crucial parts for the Planck Mission Telescope which is designed to look back into the universe to see what happened right after the big bang occurred and see the origins of the universe.

Gould made the bolometer housing for high frequency instruments, spending hours and hours sanding and polishing tiny tiny little parts for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA with JPL inspectors looking over his shoulder and testing all his work at every stage.

The Planck spacecraft, named for Max Planck, the German scientist who originated quantum theory, recently completed its “First Light” survey, which began in September. Scientists say the initial data gathered from Planck’s vantage point is excellent. Before the stars, before the galaxies, there was light; light created from the big bang, 13.7 billion years ago. This light now cooled over billions of years has formed a microwave background for the universe.

The Planck Telescope will orbit 1.5 million kilometers from the planet. It took six weeks to reach orbit and the mission will last at least 14 months. During this mission the Planck will measure temperature variations in this background radiation over a wide spectrum of the universe creating a sort of radiation light map. The Planck will be able to record temperatures more precisely than any other telescope previously launched. It has the ability to measure the composition and shape of the earliest time of the universe (just seconds after the big bang) at a resolution ten times better than any previous attempts at measuring this data.

To detect the tiniest of details Planck will have some of the most sophisticated equipment and instruments with extremely sensitive detectors which were chilled to within a tenth of a degree above absolute zero. Some of these detectors will be the coldest to ever operate in space.

Gould had many years of experience working at machine shops at the California Institute of Technology, which led up to his work on Planck telescope.

“I’m from New Jersey and my dad was a machinist: I worked in his shop,” said Gould. “I skipped my senior year in high school and went to Franconia College in New Hampshire. My parents gave my sister and me a lot of freedom to experiment. I also went to a vocational school and they placed me in a machine shop. Then I was motorcycling across the country at one point and I got hired at the central engineering machine shop at the California Institute of Technology, Cal Tech. I was very lucky. They were doing a lot of big projects in high energy physics. It was wonderful. I had a lot of responsibility and I had a staff of 12 people. We did a lot of complicated projects. I stayed there for seven years and for six years I ran the machine shop.”

Gould worked at Cal Tech from 1980 to 1992. In 1985 he started his own machine shop, Zen Machine Shop, in his garage in Pasadena, California. “I invested in some equipment and I bought a mill, a lathe and a band saw,” said Gould. “As professors left Cal Tech they still wanted me to do their work and that spread into a huge network across the country. I did work for the professors I knew when they went to other universities and more people began to know and hear about my work. I did their work on my off time in my garage and I still worked for Cal Tech.”

Later Gould moved to Colorado with his wife Joyse Yuen. When Cal Tech begin bidding on making instruments for the Planck telescope, Cal Tech engineers told JPL to include Gould in the bidding process and he won the contract to make the bolometer housing. A bolometer is an etched silicon wafer that looks like a spider web, sandwiched into a metal housing of the right resonance to accurately measure energy of a particular frequency. “I was able to match these sets for their corresponding frequencies to about 50 millionths of an inch,” he said.

But getting the contract from JPL was not so easy.  Before Gould was accepted by JPL to make these tiny parts, the men in black came to inspect his machine shop which sits near his house in his garage and the end of a long winding dirt road on the side of a mountain. After driving their big cars up the dirt road to his house on the steep hillside they took one at his modest garage and said, “No way.” They did not believe that Gould could possible produce highly technical precision parts for the Planck out of his crowded little garage in this remote area. But engineers from Cal Tech came to his defense and said they told JPL that they would not do the project unless Marty Gould was the guy making their parts in his machine shop. Finally JPL relented, reluctantly.

“To make these parts I sat looking through my microscope for days sanding one tiny little part,” said Gould who also teaches students from time to time. He has mentored many high school students and has customers such as National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, the University of Colorado, Princeton, NCAR and others. He won the faculty teaching award for teaching students in the machine shop at Cal Tech.

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