When Tom Magner ’75 arrived at Lynchburg College in the fall of 1971, he thought he’d be a math major. After all, the Queens, New York, native, who moved to New Jersey as a youngster, says he was “good at math.”
It wasn’t long, however, before he changed course. “I had taken physics in high school and then took a physics course as a college freshman,” he said. “I liked math, but became disillusioned with the practicality of math for a future, and started seeing it in physics.”
At the time, physics classes were taught by the late Dr. Shirley Rosser ’40, who taught at Lynchburg for 45 years, and Dr. Julius Sigler ’62, a longtime professor of physics and namesake of Lynchburg’s science building, Hobbs-Sigler Hall.
Magner recalls both professors as “very inspirational, challenging me and helping keep me on the right track.” He also edited a book Rosser was working on at the time.
Four years later, when Magner graduated from Lynchburg, he had a bachelor’s degree in physics. What he needed now was a job — as he puts it, “any job.” He knew he wanted to do “something in engineering,” but beyond that was at a loss.
“It wasn’t necessarily a great year to be looking for engineering jobs,” he said, adding that after the historic moon landing in 1969, “all the moon stuff with NASA had fallen off and they were in decline. They really hadn’t been hiring for some time. If anything, they’d been laying off people.”
Soon, Magner found a job and, somewhat ironically, it was with NASA. More specifically, it was with the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
While Magner admits to having a “passing interest” in earth and space science prior to that, it wasn’t long before he found his calling.
“Coming out of college, I was looking for a job,” he said. “Fortunately, I got a job with NASA. It was ‘any job,’ but once there, of course, the stuff they do — we do — was so exciting. It’s hard not to get hooked in.”
For the next 32 years — at Goddard Space Flight Center and at NASA headquarters — Magner rose through the ranks and worked on some of the U.S. space agency’s most high-profile robotic spacecraft missions.
“I was fortunate to end up in an optics group, where I got to build instruments and test instruments,” Magner said. “Those instruments, we put on either spacecraft — or another thing we liked to use was sounding rockets. We would launch the sounding rockets out of Wallops [Island] in Virginia.
“The sounding rockets go up in the air, get into space for about four or five minutes, and come back down. We use those for proving out something with an instrument … before we spend the money to build it for use on a spacecraft.”
One of the first space missions Magner worked on was the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, which launched in 1989 and was decommissioned in 1993. “The purpose of this mission was to prove that the universe started as a big bang,” he said.
“The big bang was the moment 13.8 billion years ago when the universe began as a tiny, dense, fireball that exploded. In order to be able to perform the necessary mission measurements, two of the COBE instruments needed to operate at -452° F — very, very cold!
“I ended up assembling and testing one of the instruments and fabricating a component for the other instrument. I worked part time for a few years to come up with a machine to build this very precise component that needed to … work at that very cold temperature and survive the launch vibration.
“The mission launched, successfully operated, and confirmed the theory. The two lead scientists for the mission were later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on COBE. It doesn’t get any cooler than this!”
Magner also worked on the Hubble telescope, which launched in 1990 and operates to this day. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in engineering administration from The George Washington University.
In the middle of his time with NASA, Magner took a position with NASA headquarters. There, he oversaw all engineering work for the agency’s earth science activities, serving as earth science chief engineer and division director for program planning and operations. He ended his time with NASA at Goddard, where he was the deputy director of engineering,
When he retired from NASA in 2008, he was hired by the Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory. JHU/APL is a nonprofit, private-sector University Affiliated Research Center, or UARC, and works with NASA on various projects.
From the onset, Magner has been APL’s project manager on NASA’s next flagship mission, the Europa Clipper project, which will study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The project is in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
In a 2017 Space.com article, the project’s name was explained as “a nod to the fast, three-masted sailing vessels known as clippers, which delivered a variety of goods around the world in the 19th century.”
The spacecraft is expected to launch in October 2024, with help from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and will begin four years of science observations at Europa in 2030. “Jupiter is about five times the distance from the sun as we are, so it’s a long way,” Magner said.
To get to Europa, Clipper will have to slingshot around Mars and Earth “to pick up enough velocity to get to Jupiter,” he said. “Then, [it will] use the propulsion system to slow down and get in orbit around Jupiter, flying by Europa every 14 days. We get as close as 16 miles above the surface on some flybys.”
Over the next four years or so, the Clipper will pass over Europa about 50 times, and as it does the scientific instruments — cameras, ultraviolet spectrograph, infrared spectrometer, thermal imaging system, radar, surface dust analyzer, etc. — will collect data.
“The mission’s three main science objectives are to understand the nature of the ice shell and the ocean beneath it, along with the moon’s composition and geology,” Magner said. “The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.”
That his former student is playing such a key role in high-profile NASA missions doesn’t surprise Sigler at all.
“Tom was in a group of physics majors that were pretty strong students, generally, and he stood out among them as the first one who both learned on his own and asked really good questions,” Sigler said.
“He didn’t need a lot of keeping on track, but he did ask really tough questions in class. I had to scramble to answer questions for the next class. He was thinking about things in a way that most students didn’t think about them.
“He was thinking about implications, rather than always figuring out how to solve the problems at hand, thinking beyond that.”
About the Europa Clipper in particular, Sigler added, “This is a major, major project that he’s in charge of now. This is big time.”
