Space telescope with Tucson ties will soon meet a fiery end

He ended up majoring in musical composition and physics at the U of A, earning bachelor’s degrees in both.

“Then at a certain point, he realized that music was great, he loved it, but he wasn’t gonna make a living that way, so he decided to stick with physics,” Williams said. “Fortunately for me, he went to Caltech, and we met there.”

Gehrels earned his doctorate in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology, with two standouts in the field as his advisers: Rochus Vogt and Edward C. Stone, who both played key roles in NASA’s Voyager program and at the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Williams earned her Ph.D. in chemistry on her way to her own distinguished career in research, academics, commercial science and national energy policy.

The two met in 1976, Williams said, and before long this “huge mountain man” was taking her rock climbing all over Southern California.

“We met in the dorm, had a wonderful courtship, moved in together and got married, all at Caltech,” she said. “Then we both got jobs in Maryland — he got a postdoc at Goddard Space Center; I got a postdoc at the University of Maryland — and two years later, both of us fortunately got permanent jobs.”

Gehrels and a team from Penn State University first pitched Swift to NASA in the late 1990s.

The idea was to put a rapid-response science platform in orbit to track incredibly powerful but elusive gamma-ray bursts from deep space, which were first detected 30 years earlier by Cold War-era satellites deployed to spot nuclear weapon tests.

The innovative observatory was designed to scan huge swaths of the sky at once and quickly turn to point its onboard telescopes at the first signs of a burst. Within seconds, Swift could pinpoint and observe the fading afterglow of the cosmic explosion and relay its coordinates to other observatories across the planet so they could study it, too.