Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–248
TOMBRELLO: So Fiona was going through that, and she was going through the rejections of
NuSTAR, some of which were handled quite badly by NASA. But it’s turned out well. She’s
gotten the mission and it should fly in 2012.
ASPATURIAN: And NuSTAR is an X-ray space mission?
TOMBRELLO: Yes. It’s a SMEX [Small Explorer] mission, which will launch, I suppose, from a
Pegasus. Everything looks good so far. Fiona’s got a good project manager. She’s quite
fantastic. So this is one of my coups. I love Buford Price, but it was fun taking Fiona away from
him after he just assumed he had that one in the bag. She’d been a grad student up there. They
knew her well before I knew her, but it didn’t matter. [Laughter]
So, Anneila. Well, I’ve known Anneila forever. As it turned out, when I met Stephanie,
they had been friends, so that we got the Sargents from both sides. She was a graduate student
here. Then she was a postdoc. I think they didn’t know what to do with her. They shifted her to
the staff.
ASPATURIAN: Yes, that’s right. She was a member of the professional staff.
TOMBRELLO: Then when they needed somebody to run Owens Valley [Radio Observatory], they
put her back on research faculty. I think she’s been systematically undervalued by her
astronomy colleagues. She could have been provost when Stolper was chosen if she hadn’t been
trashed by some of her colleagues. I will not mention their names. I certainly don’t believe they
have an accurate assessment of many of her talents.
ASPATURIAN: She has done some very interesting work.
TOMBRELLO: She did some very nice work on those planetary disks. She’s been a wonderful
manager, and the people who work for her adore her. She really does so many things so well.
She was director of OVRO. She was then director of CARMA. She was the first director of
CARMA in the critical stage of finding a site, which was not easy. There was negotiating with
the Forest Service. There was negotiating with the Indian tribes. There were all sorts of
obstacles. She just kept at it. Then, of course, getting the thing up there and working—she was
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