Bits of This and That

by Charley Kohlhase

retold by Barbara Amago

On November 14, 2002, about fifteen minutes before the JPL Story program
was to start, the library staff was finishing setting up the chairs,
testing the sound system, and getting the laptop and projector ready.
Storyteller Charley Kohlhase, a frequent library user, and well known to
library staff, arrived promptly, projecting an air of brisk energy. As
the audience began to file in, many of them greeted Charley warmly. At
4:00 Teresa Bailey, the story coordinator, asked the audience to please
take their seats and began her introductory remarks.

"Charley is a former science and mission design manager," Teresa began,
"He led mission design teams and project systems engineering activities
for numerous deep-space missions during the 1960s through 1990s,
including Mission Design Manager for the Voyager Grand Tour mission.  In
addition, he has always been heavily involved in creating public
engagement materials that blend art, science, and education. Charley
retired in 1998, but is currently supporting several NASA/JPL activities
as an "on-call JPL employee."  These include the Mars Program Systems
Engineering Team, the Mars Technology Program review board, the Kepler
project as an external technical advisor, one final Cassini edutainment
project, and several other space mission review boards and technical
assignments.

When Charley took the mike he explained the format of his story and why
he decided to base it on a Powerpoint presentation. "I'm a sort of
'essence person'," he said, "and also very visual, so I decided to show
nice imagery rather than just ramble on about the past."

He then began his story, which focused on six broad topics: building
missions, public engagement, virtual reality, art and science, changes
at JPL, and Earth's greatest challenge.

# Building Missions

Charley was a mission builder for a great part of his career at JPL.
There are really only a few elements to a mission -- and Charley's first
slide showed five of them: science, navigation, spacecraft, Earth base,
and launch vehicle. "It should be easy," said Charley with a smile,
"just fly a few sensors to some remote world and then send the info back
to Earth." He then added a few remarks and proceeded to his next
illustration which showed the basic mission elements as interlocking
pieces of a puzzle.

There are basically two approaches to building missions, top-down and
bottoms-up. In the "old days," the approach was always top-down, taking
exactly what the scientific community wanted and making it happen.
Today, the approach is, by necessity, more cost-conscious, which leads
to bottoms up. You look to see what's "on the shelf," negotiate changes
with the investigators, and then build the mission.

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Because he is often asked to explain how gravity assist works, Charley
developed an illustration which he shared with the audience. A kid is
throwing a ball (analog for the spacecraft) at the front of a train
(analog for Jupiter, or whatever planet is doing the assisting), while
the "sun" sits in front of the train station watching the action. The
ball is moving at 30 miles per hour (mph) toward the train, and the
train is traveling at 50 mph. Relative to the conductor inside the
train, the ball, as it bounces off the front of train, is perceived to
be traveling at 80 mph, but relative to the sun, which is sitting still,
the ball is moving at an amazing 130 mph for a directly head-on throw.
Even if the ball is thrown from an angle 45 degrees off head on, the
ball still rebounds at about 123 mph relative to the station platform.

## Public Engagement

Since Charley has retired (he still consults at the Lab part-time), he's
had more time to spend on public outreach for space exploration. He
explained that the Lab now calls these activities "public engagement,"
but that the concept remains the same -- to share our enthusiasm and
pride in our achievements with the general public and to engage them in
our endeavor -- the exploration of space.

In the late 60's and early 70's there began to be more demand for
graphical representations of space missions. Charley got interested and
began working with the JPL Graphics department to develop better ways to
represent three-dimensional objects. Later on, he heard of someone very
special working at the University of Utah named Jim Blinn, with whom he
began to work to produce improved computer animations and graphics. He
described a bump-mapping technique developed by Blinn that they were
able to use successfully as a way to trick the human eye and the
lighting laws to create realistic 3D images that didn't require so much
computer memory. In this manner, a great deal of memory was spared by
not having to "model" all of the 3D variations in each vertex of the
otherwise vast network of polygons comprising a minutely detailed
surface, such as that of a carpet or an orange. Bump-mapping works great
for small undulations in a surface, but not for large changes where the
geometry must be modeled.

Charley shared some examples of some Voyager flyby computer animations
that he and Jim Blinn developed during the 1970's. The contrast between
the "wireframe" images used in the early 70's and the shaded 3D images
from later in the decade were remarkable. He also shared some examples
of other projects he worked on at the Lab, including an edutainment
project that he's working on currently, as time permits. It is called
"2004 -- A Light Knight's Odyssey," whose sound track is done, but not
the costly animation. The computer-character voice parts have been read
by such famous actors as James Earl Jones, John Travolta, Samuel
Jackson, Ann Archer, Michael York, Sarah Michelle Geller, Robert
Picardo, and other notables.

He then related the story of how 620,000 signatures contributed by
people from 81 different countries got to fly aboard Cassini. The
signatures were submitted on postcards and the Planetary Society scanned
them all in. Charley convinced them that it would be higher-tech to put
them all on a DVD. Ten copies were made of the DVD, one on the
spacecraft, 8 in museums around the world, and one copy is missing.
Charley suggested that it might be in one of the retirement boxes of a
former project official.

**Virtual Reality**

Charley's next slide illustrated how 3D programs work. "Primitives" are
developed on a computer and assembled in more complex shapes to create
everything from boxes to cities. Displays can range from "wire frame" to
fully shaded and colored. By removing the "hidden lines," wire frame
images are easier to visualize, but of course the addition of solid
surfaces and shading look the best. Flat texture maps are added and
shapes are smoothed. Then the image is bump-mapped and other features,
such as shadows and transparency, are added. Last, any special effects
and/or animation is included.

The next illustrations Charley shared were some space scenes he
developed, and which at one point he contributed to an art competition
at the Lab. The works that were selected by a team of judges were to be
hung on the 9^th^ floor of 180 for a period of time. One of Charley's
space scenes entitled "Valles Marineris, 2075" was selected, but was
later deemed as inappropriate to hang in such a prominent place because
of his depiction of an attractive long-legged woman in a short skirt set
in a futuristic space landscape. Naturally, Charley was bothered by what
he viewed as art censorship and removed his piece from the exhibition.
"I showed the female spaceship officer in a position of power, not of
anything less," he said. He offered this incident as an example of
excessive political correctness. "Political correctness continues to
reach new highs," Charley said, "And there will be more about this
later."

He then described how the different images were created, using a
combination of photographic and computer graphics techniques. An image
of a man flying a spacecraft through an imaginary world was actually
made from a photograph of Charley sitting in a chair in his own
driveway, but later "composited" into the cockpit of a 3D hovercraft.

Charley had several examples that illustrated how different images are
constructed, and he commented about how many hours it took to complete
them. The time necessary to construct an image and its ultimate quality
and impact to the viewer may bear little relation -- an image of two
space-suited figures tending a plant under a clear field dome on the
surface of Mars took about 25 hours to create, whereas a very
complex-looking image of a craft speeding through space was constructed
in less than an hour. You can see several of his images in the October
2002 issue of Caltech's *Engineering and Science Magazine.*

# Art and Science

The thing that really excites Charley now is blending art and science.
He then shared several examples from nature and art. Two works he finds
particularly interesting are Marcel Duchamp's 1912 painting "Nude
Descending a Staircase #2" and Olivier Deschamps' sculpture
"Espoir-Desespoir." Duchamp's work caused quite a stir when it was
exhibited in New York -- the cubist, futuristic style had never been
used before to depict the human body. The other example, Deschamps'
sculpture of a mother and child, uses the relaxing and restoration of a
memory metal (nickel-titanium) in the mother's stomach to move the
sculpture up and down with changes in the ambient temperature. This
causes the mother's arms, holding the child, to move downward at night
as the metal cools and relaxes under the pull of gravity ... and move
upward as the sun rises and the metal's temperature returns to the
levels it experienced during manufacture.

Another fascinating subject is evolution as art. Contemporary artists
and scientists are designing virtual evolution simulations that have
great potential for creating new art, as well as new life forms. In two
examples from Karl Sims' work one can see how the artist used computer
simulations to model growth. Another artist currently working in this
field is Dr. Eric Heller, a physicist at Harvard, who models the motion
of electrons over bumpy surfaces to produce art works that sell.

Charley has had the opportunity to know and work with many very creative
people during his career, and he shared his observations about what
defines creative people. They are often smart, playfully energetic, and
move easily between reality and fantasy. They are aware of the great
beauty of the natural world and are both passionate and objective. They
may be rebellious, but disciplined, and often involved in more than one
field. There is often an element of eros but tempered by restraint, as
well as a blend of masculinity and femininity.

# Changes at JPL since 1959

Charley enumerated many changes that have taken place at JPL during his
tenure at the Lab. Some good, some bad, and some neutral in his opinion.
On the positive side, he listed that JPL employees are no longer
second-class to the Caltech faculty and that we have more computer
power. There are more projects, although they tend to be smaller. On the
negative side, he opined that a more process-oriented approach might
restrict individual initiative. There was more administrative paperwork
and an excessive preoccupation with political correctness. The relative
influence of politics over engineering is increasing in his opinion, and
he is also concerned about the increased need for security.

Other changes that he's seen over the years are more neutral, such as
the more formal accountability and more meetings. He expressed concern
about the increasing association with military backgrounds for O'Keefe
and several of his staff at NASA, and hopes that this trend will be
short-lived, with a return to the days of space visionaries at the helm.
He ruefully recalled what a privilege it was, on a space-available
basis, for a junior engineer to catch the Lab-provided 14-minute
helicopter ride to LAX, if there were seats left after a senior JPLer
had scheduled the flight. "You took off over Brookside golf course,
passing over the unending blanket of swimming pools in southern
California, and 14 minutes later, you landed on the tarmac right next to
your plane. It was great!" he exclaimed. "But it went the way of other
cost-savings measures."

# Earth's Greatest Challenge

Charley closed his presentation with an impassioned argument for
safeguarding the Earth's resources and natural environment. He quoted E.
O. Wilson's May 1995 statement, "As a biologist, I feel like an art
curator watching the Louvre burn down." He finds the huge impact that
humans are making on habitats, fishery stocks, topsoil, water, forests,
and all types of wildlife increasingly alarming. The principal causes
are over-population, over-usage of natural resources, and the mantra of
continued, unchecked economic growth. He asked the audience a rhetorical
question, "So, is the Earth just going to be ruined beyond recovery, or
are we going to do something about it?"

To wrap up his story, Charley offered a list of what he calls his "Memes
for Living." (He defined "memes" as ideas, units of thought that can
propagate from brain to brain, a concept Charley attributed to Richard
Dawkins in his book, *The Selfish Gene*.)

> *• Get an education, and use this knowledge well.*
>
> *• Rise early and seize each day (Carpe Diem).*
>
> *• Care about some pursuit with passion.*
>
> *• Spend quality time with those you love.*
>
> *• Use logic to fight the omnipresent irrational.*
>
> *• Be ethical to the highest degree.*
>
> *• Treat your body with respect.*
>
> *• Defend the environment to your last breath.*
>
> *• Meld mind and heart for greatest creativity.*
>
> *• Follow your dreams, and become all you can be.*

The audience clearly agreed with Charley's assessment as they warmly
applauded at the conclusion of his story.