Roc Cutri, who served as IPAC Deputy Director for 22 years while leading the science data centers for 2MASS, WISE, and NEOWISE during his 31-year career at IPAC, is retiring this month.
As a long-time IPAC employee, Roc’s dedication to infrared astronomy is reflected in his numerous professional awards, which include the 2020 George Van Biesbroeck Prize from the American Astronomical Society for his “long-standing and selfless service and support for ground- and space-based infrared astronomy,” the National Academy of Science’s 2007 James Craig Watson Medal for his “monumental work in developing and completing the Two Micron All-Sky Survey, thus enabling a thrilling variety of explorations in astronomy and astrophysics," and NASA’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal in 2018 for “outstanding leadership of NEOWISE science data processing, resulting in the first space-based Near-Earth Object mission, and an archive with 20 million images and 75 billion sources.”
Beyond the accolades, however, is a very humble scientist whose pioneering work with processing and curating science data has enabled countless researchers—including numerous citizen scientists—to discover astronomical objects and phenomena, and to characterize and track moving objects like comets and asteroids.
In this conversation, Roc shares his reflections on his storied career and some advice for new astronomers.
Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up and go to school? Tell us about how you got your start in astronomy.
I was born and raised in San Diego—I’m a California boy. I started getting interested in physics and astronomy in high school. My first physics class was eye-opening, and then I majored in physics in college, but also took some astronomy classes at UC Santa Cruz during my first year. I was always fascinated with astronomy but hadn't really decided that's what I wanted to do for a career until I started taking the courses and had a chance to do some projects as an undergraduate with faculty members.
I transferred to UC San Diego and finished my bachelor's degree in physics because they didn't have an astronomy program at the time (they do now). Then I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona and studied astronomy.
Which field within astronomy did you focus on?
I was raised as a quasar and active galaxy astronomer. Those were my first projects. Although now, I'm a planetary scientist, apparently.
The one thing I learned over time was it was important to be a generalist and have a broad base in your studies so you're flexible. You recognize interesting things and know where the interesting problems are, so it's not a big thing to pivot. I've written papers on everything from asteroids to high-redshift quasars, though at the time z=4 was high redshift.
As an undergraduate student at UCSD, I studied with Margaret and Geoff Burbridge and did a project for Margaret looking at a photographic spectrum and using a comparator microscope. That was fun. I did a lot of data reduction for people. I got to go to Lick Observatory a couple times with Gene Smith. But then I got a job with the infrared group at UCSD with Steve Willner and that sent me down the rabbit hole forever.
I couldn't get away from infrared.
What interested you about infrared astronomy?
At the time, it was a burgeoning field that was still pretty young, and the originators of modern infrared astronomy were still very much active and working in the field. It was an opportunity to be not quite on the ground floor, but pretty close to the ground floor.
I think of myself as being part of the first-and-a-half generation of infrared astronomers.
Just what it revealed, what it allowed you to do in terms of understanding the universe—it allowed you to use the universe as a very interesting laboratory to address interesting questions that you can't get at in visible light.
I started out doing ground-based infrared astronomy, which is painful stuff. All of my thesis work was done from ground-based observations, anywhere from one to 10 microns.
How did you find your way to IPAC after you graduated and completed a postdoc?
I stayed at Arizona and did postdoc work on IRAS [Infrared Astronomical Satellite] with Frank Low. I came to know and love IPAC during that time because we were working on the IRAS Serendipitous Survey Catalog, the catalog that time forgot, which you can still access through IRSA. Until Spitzer launched, it had some of the deepest space mid- and far-infrared observations of any mission. I was one of the co-authors on that work with Frank, Susan Kleinmann, Fred Gillette and Erick Young, and as a result of that, we worked very closely with the folks at IPAC, including Gerry Neugebauer, and so I came to know and appreciate the work of many of the people at IPAC. I was hired to work on 2MASS [2 Micron All Sky Survey] and moved to Pasadena in 1994.
Tell us about the early days of 2MASS. What did you find interesting enough about it to move to California?
Well, I'm a Southern Californian by birth, but being from San Diego, I grew up always saying I would never live in Los Angeles, so be careful what you say. The good news is we came to discover pretty quickly Pasadena ain't L.A. It's close enough to everything and all the benefits, but also far enough tucked away on its own.
2MASS interested me from the get-go only because at the time it was the ultimate expression of the ground-based infrared astronomy I'd been doing for years, and it corresponded to the early development and early evolution of our infrared array detectors.
It's always surprised me that visible light astronomers never embraced the onset of CCDs the way infrared astronomers embraced array detectors to do all-sky surveys. Why? To me, one of the first things you want to do is make the basic navigation charts to the universe. I guess because they had big photographic plates for photographic surveys, they didn't feel compelled.
One of our co-authors on the IRAS Serendipitous Survey Catalogs and an early 2MASS Principal Investigator is Susan Kleinmann, who was often fond of saying the only astronomy worth doing is survey astronomy.
That was an extreme stance, but you know, at some level that really appeals to you because what you're doing every day is going out and seeing data nobody's ever seen before. You’re out on the forefront of the exploration. You’re out there charting the basic charts, the basic maps that are going to let everybody follow you. That was one of the appeals of doing survey work.
It's like being a pioneer, like a Lewis and Clark of space exploration.
And more importantly, not just doing it yourself, but doing it in such a way that you enable everybody else to use those data.
So 2MASS lasted for a while and then WISE, and then there was NEOWISE.
WISE [Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer] was the Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) selected for flight, and on the way to developing it, NASA Planetary Science recognized the value of the data for asteroids.
NASA asked us to prepare and submit a proposal for an augmentation to the data system for NEOWISE [Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer] that would allow us to pull out the asteroids and publish them, as well as to release all of the single exposure data that had all of the asteroid measurements in it, because the way we were combining exposures from multiple times, you would suppress the objects otherwise.
Initially, the plan was not to release the individual WISE images but only the deeper combined images, because the astronomers—that's what they care about, right? But, as it turns out, having the individual exposures was tremendously valuable to astronomy, too. Although that wasn't the objective of the original mission, it has enabled a broad array of time-domain investigations using WISE and NEOWISE data.
That's always the case with missions, right? There are always bonus science questions that get answered.
For large surveys, that's especially the case. There's always serendipity and as it is often the case, the thing that turns out to be the biggest return on the mission was not something you actually originally planned for.
What was it like to see the end of the WISE and NEOWISE missions? Was it different from saying goodbye to 2MASS?
The end of 2MASS was sad. It was over and it could have kept going. But, personally, I felt it would have probably been a mistake to try to keep the survey running. It was a better use of the money to work on the next generation of telescopes, which ultimately we got to do, but it took a while.
We built telescopes, and we operated them. And you know, in the case of 2MASS, when we were done, we turned them off and locked the door and left. The telescopes and camera were repurposed for other investigations. 2MASS could have kept observing the sky, but it was a question of funding and whether or not it was the best use of the resources.
2MASS was a joint project of NSF, NASA and the Air Force. The NSF and Air Force funded some of the prototype hardware for it, but ultimately NASA picked up most of the bill because 2MASS would produce the finding charts and find interesting targets for follow-up by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was under development at the time.2MASS found the interesting targets for follow-up by Spitzer.
WISE lasted a long time—that must have been bittersweet.
When it was over, it was over, and there was nothing we could do about it. We had the Viking funeral. WISE/NEOWISE was such an incredibly successful mission that went far beyond any of our expectations. I mean, how can you be anything but thrilled about them?
And that legacy is rolling into NEO Surveyor.
Yes, from doing WISE and NEOWISE, that informed the design and construction of NEO Surveyor. I’m thrilled that IPAC will apply all of the great experiences learned from 2MASS, WISE and NEOWISE to the future that is NEO Surveyor.
Can you share a memorable story from working at IPAC?
I can still remember seeing the first light images from 2MASS because we were here while data were coming in from the Arizona telescope. I do remember when we got the first light images from the telescope in Chile. We had been operating the one in Arizona for the better part of the year by that time, and so we figured we’ll just push the data into the data system, and it'll just run.
It all broke. And then somebody realized this telescope is in the south, so everything's been rotated.
Oh no! It's a different hemisphere.
It's a very simple fix. We changed a couple signs on indices. It was fun, in retrospect. Those are the sort of things that trip you up a little bit.
I remember having a discussion with Ray Stiening, the project manager, and he said, “Well, we can get a hacksaw out and cut off the end ring of the telescope and rotate it.” I said, “Ray, I think…just give us a couple days with the software and we'll get it fixed. How's that?”
Yeah, maybe don't resort to the nuclear option with the hacksaw just yet.
You didn't have to do it that way if you thought about it. You could’ve rotated the camera, but you couldn't have drilled new bolt holes.
What advice would you give to early-career scientists or someone who is even just considering a career in astrophysics?
That's a tough one. You know, if it's what calls to you and what you want to do with your life, go for it.
It's going to involve a lot of hard work. People underestimate how hard you have to work to be successful in this field, even before the issues of funding, though that certainly makes it even more difficult and challenging. There are so many things people are bombarded with. You have to find a way to focus and put the effort where it's necessary to do the important things.
What are the important things?
Doing your work. Doing it well. Communicating clearly. And you know, the work has to stand on its own. You're not doing it for fame and glory. You're doing it to advance the field.
What are you going to miss about working here?
The people. I will miss interacting with the people I've been working with for years, as well as the newer people. I'll miss the indescribable excitement of watching the mission you've been working on for 10 years go up on a rocket. Go baby, go!
And then seeing the first light. The first light image from WISE was very exciting. I remember huddling around Tim Conrow’s terminal when we saw the first data come in and processing the first data. And almost as exciting was the first NEOWISE data, the reactivation mission, after we turned it back on. We have a picture of that one that came out in one of the news articles, everybody huddled around—[Roc’s wife] Elaine took that one.
Are you going to be one of these astronomers who retires to do more astronomy, or are you going to step back?
No, I'm really going to retire. I may still collaborate with some people on some projects, but no, I won't be a practicing astronomer anymore.
So what will you be doing with your time?
Initially, I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to try that out for a little while.
My wife Elaine and I do have some travel plans to go to Italy, but we're not headed off for a world tour.
My mother was from Rome and my father's parents were from Southern Italy. There's an Italian saying you've probably heard of: “la dolce vita,” the sweet life. There is another saying, “dolce far niente,” which means the joy of doing nothing. I want to give that a try for a little bit.
Congratulations and ciao, Roc! Your IPAC family wishes you all the best in your well-earned retirement.
Members of the NEOWISE team witness the first data arriving from the space telescope after it was reactivated in 2013.
