When it was installed just 17 years ago, the telescope was touted as the largest research telescope in Florida.
But now Florida Tech’s aging exhibition telescope has been without sight for more than five years, as the sauna-like 120-degree Fahrenheit heat inside its metal dome atop the F.W. Olin Physical Sciences Center has degraded its plastic and rubber components.
But that may be changing: A small team of students and faculty is working diligently to revive and upgrade damaged optical equipment using a systematic “reverse engineering” approach.
If all goes well, the crippled instrument should start detecting light again by the end of the year, said Luis Quiroga Nunez, who was named director of Florida Tech’s Ortega Observatory early last year and tasked with starting the repair work.
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“We are a technical university, we should have enough knowledge. All our students want the opportunity to actually do something and get hands-on experience,” Quiroga Nunez said, sitting in the observatory’s control room.
“I told Dr. (Lee) Callaway about this, and he said, ‘This is not an alien machine. We can do this. We have the resources. Let’s get started. Let’s try,” Quiroga Nunez said.
But the technical challenges with the broken telescope remain significant.
- Callaway, a lecturer in electrical engineering and computer science, said parts of the circuitry were designed in 1985, while other older computer chips and integrated circuits are no longer manufactured.
- The software that controls the telescope was licensed to run using Windows Vista, an operating system that Microsoft stopped selling in retail stores in 2010., Quiroga Nunez said.
- Telescope technical consultants are few and far between and can charge thousands of dollars a day, he added.
And there was a disastrous “rash decision” blunder a few years ago when someone unplugged 50 to 60 telescope cables during a hurricane approaching the Space Coast, then later plugged them back into the wrong ports, Callaway said.
“The lightning cut all the wiring. They were like, ‘Oh, we don’t want to destroy the computers,’ but they forgot to mark which wires went where,” Callaway said.
“I rewired everything backwards. The motor drivers broke. Various electronics broke. As a result, everything that went with it broke too,” he said.
“The result was a lot of chaos and a cascading failure,” he said.
About Florida Institute of Technology’s Ortega Observatory
In 2004, Florida Tech officials won a $347,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to install a telescope with a 24-inch primary mirror on the rooftop observatory of the future F.W. Olin Physical Sciences Center, which was then under construction.
Additionally, Melbourne Beach resident James Ortega donated $150,000 to Florida Institute of Technology to increase the size of the primary mirror to 32 inches, making it the largest research telescope in Florida at the time.
Ortega, an author of books on computing, has had a long career in academia and high-tech companies, including serving as director of the Laboratory for Scientific, Engineering and Computing Applications at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
In November 2007, workers used a crane to hoist and install the new Cassegrain telescope with Ritchey-Chretien optics into the rooftop dome.
Ortega and his wife, Sara, also left bequests to Florida Tech totaling approximately $2.5 million to establish an astronomy professorship, a fellowship program for graduate students studying astronomy, undergraduate scholarships and the Ortega Lecture Series.
In March, astrophysicist Noor Raouafi gave a public science talk on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission at the Gleason Performing Arts Center as part of the series.
Florida Tech offers bachelor’s degrees in astrobiology, astronomy, astrophysics, and planetary sciences, master’s degrees in space systems, space systems management, and space science, and a doctorate in space science.
“The temperature in the upper dome can easily reach 120 degrees.”
A yellow spiral staircase leads up to the Ortega Observatory, where a partially disassembled telescope is flanked by folding tables carrying hand tools, screws, pieces of wood, coffee cups, and various props from the workshop.
Quiroga Nunez budgeted money last year to pay 13 students studying astronomy, astrophysics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering to repair and redesign the instrument, and faculty pitched in. Using more than 1,000 photographs, the team created a 3-D image computer model of the telescope for future reference.
“You have to be very careful and before you open up a machine and start unscrewing every single screw, understand: ‘What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Is it necessary? What is the plan?'” Quiroga Nunez asked.
Inside the dome near the telescope, Callaway and three students pointed to an orange rubber wheel on the floor that had disintegrated into pieces due to the heat.
“The No. 1 cause of failure is heat. The dome on top can easily get up to 120 degrees, and the parts that move and rotate the dome are made of plastic,” Callaway said.
“After 20 years, the plastic falls apart. You have to replace the joints, the brackets, the wires and all the other things that come with it,” he said.
Lightning strikes? That’s a campus urban legend
Quiroga Nunez said it’s still unclear when the Florida Tech telescope will be operational, though she estimated the custom-built instrument stopped functioning sometime between 2017 and 2019, with unscheduled maintenance also contributing to the outage.
“The students were reading the manuals and trying to follow what each cable was doing and why,” Quiroga Nunez said.
“It’s sad, but that’s the reality. Every time we find a way to solve something, we find out there’s three more problems. But that’s part of the business. That’s what you get when you reverse engineer,” he said.
An urban legend on the Florida Tech campus is that the telescope was offline for so long that some students thought it was struck by lightning, said Adriana Agustin, who graduated with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering this spring and is now working on fixing the telescope as she works toward a master’s in the field.
Last summer, students converted a fourth-floor classroom below the telescope into the observatory’s control room, with computer workstations inside that allow remote control of telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and the Nordic Optical Telescope in Spain’s Canary Islands.
By April, Agustin said, the students’ repair efforts had taken the telescope “from dead to working,” repairing the primary mirror door mechanism and replacing the two main motors that control the telescope’s right ascension and declination, allowing it to focus on interstellar targets.
The students also designed and built a sturdy wooden A-frame lift to carefully remove the 350-pound primary mirror in June and transport it to New York, where it will be re-aluminized and returned to campus in a few months.
Florida Tech students reverse engineer and replace parts
Agustin and classmate Marisa Guerra helped present their graduate research, “Reconstructing and Updating the Ortega Observatory Telescope,” at the university’s Northrop Grumman Engineering and Science Student Design Showcase, held at the Clemente Center in April. Guerra, who just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, said she was hired by Northrop Grumman in Melbourne the following month.
“We had to reverse engineer the mirror door system at the top of the telescope,” Guerra said.
Kate Helminiak, a senior majoring in astronomy and astrophysics and a third-team All-Sunshine State Conference selection on the Panthers’ girls swimming team, has been working with the telescope since spring 2023, helping to catalog the disorganized items inside Ortega Observatory, where she unearthed a set of blueprints for the telescope in an unlikely place.
“I didn’t have the manual until last summer. It was lost. Then I found it in the downstairs closet under some arts and crafts and miscellaneous stuff,” Helminiak said.
On Monday afternoon, Quiroga Nunez and Florida Tech President John Nicklow will host a ceremony on campus to celebrate the new partnership between Ortega Observatory and the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Officials will discuss how Florida Tech will operate the portable robotic observatory.
EFSC plans new planetarium for Cocoa
Elsewhere in Brevard County, disaster struck the 24-inch telescope on the roof of Eastern Florida State College’s planetarium and observatory at its Cocoa campus. In 2017, wind gusts from Hurricane Irma blew part of the roof off, forcing the facility to close.
“Damage from Hurricane Irma included the roof and moisture damage to all optical equipment, including the telescope,” university spokesperson Suzanne Raines said in an email.
“In 2019 a Castaldo analysis was conducted and the Delaware North Park Service (DNPS) came to evaluate the equipment. DNPS determined that due to damage from exposure to the elements and the age of the equipment, it was beyond repair,” Rains said in an email.
Crews would demolish the damaged building in 2022. Looking to the future, EFSC officials have included the construction of a future $21.6 million planetarium overlooking Clear Lake in their $87 million, 10-year master plan for revitalizing the Cocoa campus. University officials plan to raise most of the master plan’s project funding through budget requests from the Florida Legislature, the press release stated.
EFSC’s old planetarium was built when the school was Brevard Community College in 1974. Brevard Public Schools sent about 12,000 students to the school each year during its final years in operation.
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Rick Neal Neil is a space reporter for Florida Today. Contact Neil atcontact addressTwitter/X: Rick Neal 1
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