Interview by Brendan Bane
I met with Rob Irion, director of the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program, to discuss his recent National Geographic article, which describes the youth of our solar system. Below is the full transcript of our conversation about his article, writing process, and career.
How did your interest in astronomy begin?
It began when I was a little boy in Vermont where the skies are beautiful and dark and clear, where the aurora borealis are visible, and the constellations are crisp and stunning. I would just look up at the night sky and think about how cool it would be to learn more about it, beyond what I was learning in basic science classes. I always did as much reading as I could about space. I was a voracious science fiction reader. Especially Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury. Bradbury especially with his solar system-based articles and Clark with his more speculative pieces. They really fired my imagination.
I also had a great aunt who was really instrumental in getting me involved with science from a young age. She would send me articles from NY Times science section. She really challenged me to read above my reading level. She sent me my first calculator. She enrolled me in a science kit of the month club—with cool experiments that were much better than an ant farm. I loved all of that. In high school it really all revolved around astronomy for me, largely through the series cosmos by Carl Sagan, which inspired so many people at that time, this was in the late 70’s. That was an amazing program and to see someone communicate like that about space was deeply inspiring to me. I also joined an astronomy club and loved looking through telescopes. I imagined what it would be like to learn more about these distant objects.
My dream was to go to MIT and major in astronomy, and that’s what happened. Although my actual major was earth and planetary sciences. I studied mostly astronomy and physics. For much of my time at MIT I was aiming toward a PhD in astrophysics and writing was just a side thing. I was a creative writing minor. When it came time to do the nitty-gritty science of astronomy research, it was not as compelling as I had hoped. It was a lot of computer programming. It was a lot of data reduction. I didn’t really like that aspect of it. But I never lost touch with the romantic side of astronomy- the wonder of learning more about the universe. When I decided I didn’t want to pursue science as a career that was the next best thing for me, to be able to write about it and to convey it to others.
Had you always been a writer?
I had always written short stories, probably from grade six onward. I did it more seriously in high school, where I wrote science fiction short stories. Then I took a series of three creative writing classes at MIT, with some very good people, including Sue Miller, who was a really noted novelist. She wrote The Good Mother or Good Father, or something, I can never remember. I liked creative writing. I was pretty good at it, but I couldn’t see doing it professionally. It looked to be horribly stressful, years and years on a book.
Then I took a science journalism class when I was a senior, and the professor was very well connected, she knew John Wilkes, then director of the Santa Cruz writing program. When she saw my aptitude for science journalism, she suggested I might consider pursuing some graduate level training. I said, “I kind of want to make sure I really enjoy writing first.” So I worked for two years as a newspaper reporter, just doing general assignment reporting and nothing to do with science. I liked it, so I came out to Santa Cruz to combine the two, the science and the journalism.
You spoke of being inspired by the Vermont skies. If you could put the same feeling in readers, or have them walk away with any feeling, what would it be?
I have tried to do that, several times. Before I wrote this cover story for Nat Geo, I wrote two essays for the magazine. For the essays, they encourage the authors to use the first person and to draw from personal experiences. So in fact my very first essay for National Geographic started out with me looking up at those Vermont skies. I wanted to do that to tap into what I think is a commonly shared wonder about the universe and our place in it that we often lose sight of in the day to day. If you can evocatively bring someone back to those nights where they were simply lying out and watching meteors or looking through binoculars at the moon or seeing Saturn through a telescope for the first time, if you can invoke commonly shared experiences like that in the context of- this stuff is so amazing and it’s wonderful to look at, but there’s so much that we don’t know and there’s so much we need to do to continue to explore these phenomena- and to introduce science in that way, through the commonly shared personal sense of belonging that we all deeply have somewhere but most of us haven’t thought about it for years. I try to instill a sense of wanting to explore further once I’ve probed some really interesting mysteries. But it doesn’t stop there- that they continue to want to read more about it in other venues.
And for certain articles, like this solar system article, a sense that science really does have a lot to tell us about where we came from. That this is not a mythology. That this is not a tale. There is no whiff of creationism in this. This is an authentic reconstruction of what happened, to the best of scientists’ knowledge today. And that’s worth writing about.
I’m curious about the inspiration that set you onto this article. How did it start?
It’s not a simple story to tell because it spans more than a decade. When I started freelance writing in 1997, I was writing about astrophysics and cosmology and not planetary science so much. The main magazine I was writing for, which was science magazine, they have a planetary science correspondent. He covers all this stuff, so I was writing about everything outside of the solar system. It wasn’t until I began writing for other magazines, most noticeably discover, that I first came across some planetary science research that really interested me a lot. I wrote a couple major articles for Discover. One was about astrobiology and the possibility of life on Europa. Another was about comet research and missions to comets. From that point forward I began to think more about writing planetary stories because they seem to resonate a lot more with readers. I was getting more reaction from friends and family and colleagues.
I think it’s because we all have this idea of the solar system. We grow up reading about the planets, we see all the images from Voyager spacecraft that had been returned to earth by NASA. We see them as places rather than abstractions. Distant galaxies, black holes, cosmology, and the fate of the universe is all mind-blowing, but it’s really hard to picture. We have a very clear picture of the solar system embedded in our brains by virtue of the way that we’re brought up in our educational system. So when I started writing about those things, I had an opportunity to write articles that could be more deeply felt by readers.
After I wrote a few pieces for Discover, I began writing for Smithsonian magazine. For that magazine, I went even further in that direction of writing about familiar objects and the new science behind all of these familiar objects, like the sun or comets. I did a more substantive piece for Smithsonian about the origins of comets and how we had sent a mission out into space to bring back particles of a comet for the first time and how compelling that was. Then near earth objects which are these asteroids that could conceivably plow into earth causing major destruction and death like the one in Russia in February.
I began to go to all of these places where this research was being done and became much more attuned to keeping tabs on the scope of research within the solar system and things that people were studying that were really at the forefront. That’s how I got to the point of realizing that this new conception of the solar system’s history and its dynamic violence had really not been told in the pages of National Geographic and that they were overdue for covering this new awareness of how our planetary system came to be and how all of that chaos had affected Earth. They hadn’t done it. Other magazines had done it. When I realized that, I just got up the gumption or the courage to request a meeting with the editors of National Geographic in Washington DC when I was there for business, and to pitch this story to them.
I knew they were thinking about a story about the moon already. They were thinking something along the lines of the moon being a Rosetta stone for understanding what had happened on the early earth. The moon preserves a record because it has no atmosphere. You see all of these craters that are billions of years old and it is a piece of the earth. A record of our early planet is preserved on the moon. I said the story is way more interesting than that.
Because I had done all this reporting on comets and asteroids, I was in a position to be able to go to the editors of the magazine and to tell them “if you make this story a more sweeping story about the motions of planets and how those planets, by moving through the solar system, cast things wildly in all directions, like a whirlwind moving through a pile of leaves, the story will become much more dynamic than a more static story about the moon. So they were there, I was here, and we converged on this story that we all thought would work.
The story also has to look great or they won’t accept it. The photography editor and the art designer have equal say in determining whether or not a story is chosen. In that meeting, I had to convey to them, “here’s what the story would like if we hired an illustrator to depict the motions of planets, the formation of the moon, the distant reaches of the solar system, and so on.” We came to a consensus.
Tell me about the scientists you worked with and where you traveled.
A lot of the reporting for this piece grew out of things I had done previously. I’m not at all shy about saying I couldn’t have written this story ten years ago or maybe even five years ago. I simply hadn’t seen enough. I hadn’t talked to enough people. I hadn’t been to these really interesting places and observatories. I hadn’t seen these artifacts they had brought back, these meteorites and comet pieces. All of the Smithsonian and Discover reporting factored into this article as well.
But for this story specifically I went to Boulder Colorado, which is the home of the southwest research institute, a planetary science research facility that does a lot of theoretical work about the origins of planets and satellites and asteroids and the motions of things, as well as missions. The director of the mission to Pluto, which is called new horizons and will encounter Pluto in two years, he works there.
When I do interviews for pieces like this, I request a lot of time. This is not a 45-minute conversation. The main person, Hal Levison, who was the central character in this story, I spent about 5 hours with him and a couple hours with many of the other sources there. A lot of them ended up not in the article. A lot of the conversations I had just didn’t end up in the piece because there wasn’t room. That was just to be with them, in person. When you’re with them in the lab, the interviews are far richer. National Geographic has a budget to send you anywhere you want to go.
I spent a few days in Seattle at the university of Washington. The leader of the Stardust mission, which was a NASA mission to bring comet particles back to earth works there and they have a lot of the particles have been studied in their lab with an electron microscope. I wanted to see that first hand and that became the opening scene in the article, with the speck of dust being magnified 900,000x. That was a profoundly moving experience for me. Because, as the story suggests, when you’re looking at a particle like that, you’re quite literally staring back at the birth of the solar system. This is the primordial stuff out of which everything was made, everything in the solar system.
Could you describe the feeling of looking at the space dust?
The pictures that they used in the magazine, of the dust, where they have a technician looking at all of the samples- that’s actually in Houston. That’s at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. That’s in a space facility called the Astromaterials Laboratory, where they keep everything that NASA has ever brought back. Very cool. All the moon rocks are there. The moon rocks have their own building. 25.36
I’ve had a few moments in science reporting that I’ve just felt enormously privileged to see something, and that was one of them. It’s profound because it’s us. It’s us 4.55 billion years ago. The reason I started the article with it is that the specks are telling a story, the story is: we were born close to the sun and we were hurled to the other regions of the solar system violently. They didn’t know that before. They assumed comets were these quiet little fluffballs of ice and dust that gathered out in the remote regions of the solar system. And if they did form like that, you wouldn’t be seeing any of these hardened little rocks. These are specks of incredibly dense metal in the middle of a comet that shouldn’t be there. These were forged in the blast furnace. That’s why the story starts with this scene of the solar system turning itself inside out to set the stage for changing our conception of what the solar system was. It was not this quietly evolving familiar, comfortable place. It was wild from the very beginning.
Do you keep up with astronomy activities in Santa Cruz?
(Laughs) I don’t. It’s funny. The only time I do anything astronomy related is when I’m reporting a story. I don’t own a telescope. I don’t particularly feel like going out in the middle of a field. I go watch meteor showers if there’s a major one. I’m content to get my fix through the scientists when I’m reporting.
Well, it’s a unique fix that not everyone gets. You get the perspective of meeting researchers.
Oh, it’s a privilege, and I know that it is.
Could you tell me more about your favorite parts of doing this work? What are your favorite experiences from your work?
Actually, I will, but before I forget I want to say that the other really important interview I did for this story, which helped set the framework for a lot of the article, was here in SC, with Greg Laughlin, professor of astronomy at UCSC. He was invaluable in helping me understand the narrative and historical development of solar system dynamics, and also the framework for what might happen to the solar system in the future. He’s been writing about this for years himself. He’s very eloquent, does a fantastic interview, and that was invaluable.
Otherwise, for this particular article, the reporting wasn’t that glamorous. 30.35 The southwest Research Institute is basically an office building. They don’t really have anything cool there. The electron microscope thing in Seattle was really cool, but that was the only thing. Everything else was just interviews, just sitting with people and talking to them. And then everything else was done by phone, except for the in-person interview with Greg Laughlin. That reporting wasn’t like- oh my god that was amazing- except for the comet piece.
But one of the most special moments I’ve had was on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where they have major observatories like the Keck observatory. I was up there at night reporting an article for Smithsonian about the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. I got to see the laser adaptive optics system in actions. It’s this laser beam they project from inside the telescope dome into the sky. It goes up to an altitude of about 90 km, which is about 55 miles, and it creates a little artificial star by exciting a layer of sodium atoms that exist high in the atmosphere and they use the light of that little artificial star to analyze the distortions between the telescope and the artificial star that are caused by earth’s atmosphere- all the rippling of light that are caused by air currents moving around. Air is constantly moving around. It’s like looking through a stream to the bottom, and the bottom appears to be moving because the water is moving. You don’t get a steady view of the pebbles on the bottom. They’re constantly shifting back and forth. Or a penny on the bottom of a swimming pool. The star allows a computer-driven flexible mirror inside the telescope housing to exactly counteract those ripples so you cancel out the motions of the air and you get a crisp view of the sky within the field of view of that telescope.
Adaptive optics is now on every major observatory. But Keck was one of the first ones to do it using laser beams. They don’t allow people up there at night unless they’re working. It’s not a tourist thing. You can see the laser beam from other parts of the mountain. But it’s really only if you are standing outside the dome at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet in the middle of the night and they turn on the laser beam, and it really hits you. That was also an extraordinarily emotional moment for me.
It’s this brand new technology. I was immediately struck by the irony of it. Astronomers always want the sky to be as dark as possible. They’re always trying to eliminate stray sources of light. Yet now, they’re intentionally shining a laser beam exactly where they want to look. There was double irony for this story because they were studying a black hole. They were casting light into the sky to study the darkest thing in the universe. As soon as I saw that, as soon as I had that moment at the top of the mountain, I knew that I had to convey that in some way, through the kinds of emotional connections we talked about before.
And that’s where writing becomes very difficult. It can sound trite or too forced if you don’t do it in just the right way. What’s nice about Smithsonian is they allow first person. Everything I’ve written for Smithsonian has been in first person.
I’ve had a number of those impactful moments. I wrote another story for Scientific American about the James Webb telescope, which will replace the Hubble telescope. It’s the next big, orbiting space observatory, an $8 billion instrument. The mirrors for that have been made at an optical lab north of Berkeley in Richmond. They had never let a reporter go see these mirrors. But I had some connections and finagled my way in there, getting special dispensation from NASA to go write this article for Scientific American.
They showed me one of the hexagonal mirrors. They form a honeycomb structure and unfold in space like a chrysalis. One of the hexagonal mirrors was on display. The mirror is not made of glass, but a metal, Beryllium. Then they coat it with gold. I was on the platform, looking at my reflection in this mirror, realizing, “no other reporters have seen these, no one from the general public have seen these yet, they’re making these mirrors through this very top secret process, and I see my own reflection in a mirror that in 3-4 years from now will be orbiting a million kilometers from Earth, staring back at the most distant galaxies we will ever see and collecting photons that have traveled across the universe for 13 billion years to hit that exact point on that mirror.
Here I am, looking at that same mirror. And it will never be back on Earth again. That was profound for me as well and I tried to convey that in the story. When you’re a science reporter and you feel something like that, it means something. It means you need to try to understand why you reacted in that way and you need to convey it to readers in some sort of creative way that makes sense in the narrative of the story.
Is that difficult to do?
I think in the kind of writing I do now, narrative journalism for magazines, that’s the hardest part- finding those moments that make readers want to continue and resonate with their own lives.
How’d you feel when you got the story?
It was a very long process. I proposed this article in February of 2011. It was published in July of 2013. Almost 2.5 years. I certainly had the initial thrill of “I’ve gotten an assignment from NG.” This was the first feature piece I’d done for the magazine. They of course monitor their newsstand sales very carefully, and they’ve observed that space stories on the cover do very well. The only thing that does better is dinosaurs. This art came out really well. You’ve got this spectacular crash on the cover. It’s a freaky experience, walking around, and seeing it. I would walk into the drugstore to get some tooth paste and there it was.
Then the reality of “more people are going to see this by far than anything I’ve ever written...like an order of magnitude more…and that’s nerve wracking. I’ve certainly never felt more pressure writing any one thing. The hard part was the deadline being extended. They work on issues like a year in advance. Unfortunately, part of my work ethic involves having the forcing pressure of that deadline to really get it done. So it sat there for a year. I had done all of this reporting. I had all these scenes in my head. Then I didn’t write a single word for a year. I was running the program. But it was almost always on my mind, and that drove me crazy.
When did you pick up your first copy?
They send the authors 12 complimentary copies. So I got a box. When I sliced it open, I posted on FB- the box contained a 40-year old dream that had come true, from the days of sitting in my father’s reading chair. That’s literally what it was. It was a career moment that I probably won’t have again. It’s the first time I’ve been on the cover of such an iconic magazine. One that I myself read when I was 7, 8, or 9, cover-to-cover and loved. I can’t say that at that age I thought I would like to some day be on the cover of that magazine.
But I was always in love with what the people of that magazine did, and to now do it myself, it really can’t that much better as a professional journalist. A few days later, I received my regular subscription to the magazine. So I get it in my own plastic envelope with my name label on it, and there’s my article on the cover. It’s fair to say I’ve seriously been thinking about it for a decade, about how to get there. They really require a lot of their writers. You have to convince
Would you say you’re satisfied?
I am. They edit stories very intensively. At least as intensively as I edit my graduate students, but even more than that. My first draft was substantively different. (around 45 minutes- editing business about being human)
Could you comment on the process of communicating between the scientists and the general public? Do you find you have to repackage information much?
I wouldn’t use the word “repackaging.” It’s like framing. You’re picking the elements of what the scientists do, elements you think will resonate most deeply with the general audience. You’re really trying to find, how did the tale unwind. What was the starting point? Why did they begin to doubt the old story of the solar system? How did they begin to find evidence for it? How have they convinced their colleagues of this very strange idea? How has it continued to develop over time? What new evidence has come in? Back further than that, what’s the historical context? What did we used to think about the solar system? I intentionally asked all of my sources the same question: how has your conception of the solar system changed since when you were a child?
Same question for everyone. The answers were really illuminating and helped me frame the story. I could have used any number of them. The one I chose to use from Renu Malhotra, from the University of Arizona, who said “when most of us were growing up, the solar system seemed reliable and well-behaved.” That was actually a sentence I had in my mind from the very beginning of this whole process. “There were nine planets orbiting in well determined orbits like clockwork forever. Forever in the past and forever in the future.” That was perfect. That was the home run of quotes. That only comes from asking that question. Thank you Renu and thank you quote gods.
That’s the framing that I’m talking about. That’s what I put forward to the editors of the magazine. This article is going to profoundly affect people because they’ve all been brought up to believe that the solar system is one way and we are now telling them that it is something completely different, and that’s going to spin their heads around. But in order to spin their heads around, we’re going to have to ease into it. That’s what Rob Kunzig helped me do.
Most people who have been to a science museum have seen some version of these things in the lobby, where you’ve got planets moving around in real scale model orbits. But it wasn’t like that. The planets were not there all the time. They used to be much closer together, and then they went kerplooey, and everything went all over the place.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention or share?
We knew this needed to be a richly illustrated story. It’s not a story you could tell through photographs alone. Right from the very beginning, the editors and I talked very intensively about how we can make the art as dynamic as possible. We were very fortunate to have Dana Berry. He’s a former NASA artist and now an independent space artist in Southern CA. He took a year to develop these 4 illustrations. It’s an 18-page article, and eight of those pages are original artwork. I think they all came out fabulously well. I love them.
That’s a big part of the reason why anyone would pick this article up. It’s stunning to look at. That’s a privilege. If someone just dips into a few paragraphs of my story, but they read the legends (National Geographic calls the captions “legends,” they are not captions), they try to tell mini stories with those legends. They spend a lot of time editing those. I didn’t write them. The way they like to think about their presentation is- if someone just reads a few paragraphs of the story, but they also read all the legends, they’ll still get it. And I think that’s true from this. I’m not under the illusion that everyone who picks this up is going to read the entire article. Unfortunately, people don’t these days. But I think we have a better chance that people will read this whole thing because it looks so great from beginning to end, you just want to keep turning pages, and I had so much help from Rob Kunzig (my editor) to really help find the thread which made it a consistent story from beginning to end. I feel great about it.
I was going to ask, what’s next for you?
I don’t know yet. I’m going to be in Washington DC in late August for vacation. I’m going to ask for another meeting. Before then, I’ll have a couple of really good story ideas. I don’t know what they are yet, though. But they have to be perfect.
For now, I’m doing an article for Science about a group of private researchers and philanthropists called the B612 foundation. B612 is the name of the Asteroid in The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which is a classic children’s book about a boy who lives on an asteroid. This foundation is going to be an effort to find all objects larger than about 40 meters across, or 120-130 feet, that could hit earth any time within the next century. We have only found about 1% of such objects. The way that NASA is doing it is destined to take forever. Because you can’t see them from the ground. You need to go into space. The B612 foundation is going to do it. They’re going to build the spacecraft themselves with public donations. They’re raising 400 million dollars. It’s going to orbit in a similar orbit as Venus. It’ll find all of these objects in about six years. If any of them appear to be on a threatening impact trajectory, you can steer them away.
Who are these people?
They are former NASA astronauts and research scientists who have an interest in asteroids. It’s a top team. They’re great. This is not a project to be dismissed. They are very very good. They basically assembled the best team they could dream to have and it took them about two weeks to sign everyone on and say, “yes, we want to do this.” So I’m writing a detailed article about that foundation for Science Magazine in August.
I’m also writing a piece about Pluto for Slate. Those are my next two projects. It’s basically aimed at the people who hate the fact that Pluto was demoted.
Are you going to tell them to relax?
I don’t want to quite give it away yet, but I will tell you what the title of the article is, and it will give you some sense of what I’m going to do, maybe. The article is going to be called, “Pluto Wins.”
When is that one going to come out?
September. I don’t have a date yet, but it will be on Slate.com, in an astronomy package. My article will be one of amny in that apckage. I’m actually using a lot of the reporting from this article in that story. I had a whole bunch of stuff about Pluto that got cut. There was a lot of stuff that just got sliced. I had an extra 300-400 words about Pluto and it’s gone.
What’s something many people don’t know about you?
(Laughs) That’s like one of those questions on American Idol. My first feature article had nothing to do with astronomy. It was about siblings in the animal kingdom that kill and eat each other, or kill each other. The article was called, “Killer Siblings.” My parents and neighbors in Vermont hated it because it was so violent. I guess this violence theme runs throughout my stories. My very first piece was in an international wildlife magazine, and it was all about baby sharks and hyenas and egrets that kill each other. So that was fun.
I play as much volleyball as I can on both the beach and the grass.
The other thing I’ll say that might be a surprise, and the first part isn’t the surprise- I’m turning 50 this year. The surprise element, and I’ve really just been thinking about this recently, is that I feel like I haven finally hit my stride after all this time, after 25 years of being a professional writer. I feel like I finally know what I’m doing. I also feel that way about my program on campus. I know exactly what I’m doing. But it took a long time to get there. There’s still a ton of struggle. Sitting down and writing this was an incredibly painful process. But that’s true for everybody. You have to embrace that as part of the creative process. That out of this pain comes this unique creation of yours. It’s not unique unless you go through that forging.
I just now have the feeling that professionally I’m in a very good place, both with my work on campus and my national freelance work.
