Astronomical group honors booming Tucson baritone for science

Sykes, president and CEO of Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, has sung bass-baritone in the chorus of Arizona Opera for 32 years. The man needs no microphone when he speaks his truth to the powers that be.

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) announced Tuesday that Sykes is this year’s recipient of the Harold Masursky Award, given annually by the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences for “outstanding service to planetary science and exploration.”

The first Masursky Award was given in 1991 to Carl Sagan.

Sykes said in an interview Monday that he was surprised by the selection. He has been a frequent critic of program decisions made by NASA, the primary source of funding for planetary sciences in the United States.

“I have been threatened over the course of my career with a loss of funding because of my advocacy for the community. I’ll stand up and call somebody to task in front of 1,200 people at a meeting. A lot of people were afraid of doing that because they fear retribution and, unfortunately, they’re right.”

Sykes has not just managed to survive, but thrive. He spent 17 years working on space research and planetary missions as a research scientist at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory.

He became CEO and president of the Planetary Science Institute in 2004 when it had 24 employees. It now employs 107 Ph.D. researchers, 24 of whom are in Tucson, according to PSI spokesman Alan Fischer.

The Tucson office also employs 18 administrative and information technology staff and five students, Fischer said. The institute’s revenue for the year ending in Janauary 2015 was $10.66 million — 98 percent of it from NASA.

Sykes said he worries that planetary science will suffer in the coming years, with stagnant NASA budgets that are eaten up by big flagship projects.

Sykes said NASA built the planetary-science community of researchers, beginning with the 1960s campaign to go to the moon.

His suggestion, one he has made in visits to Capitol Hill, is to have a fixed NASA budget of about $1.4 billion a year for “competed missions and competed research.”

The big flagship missions, such as human exploration of Mars, would need a special appropriation.

Sykes said NASA needs continued investment in smaller missions if it wants to retain a community of planetary scientists to serve as “native guides” on its future big-scale human missions.

“We’ve been coasting on investments and decisions made back in the 1990s up to the year 2000,” he said.

Small NASA missions in the Discovery and New Horizons programs were approved at the rate of one a year in that decade, he said. That included the Dawn Mission to asteroids Vesta and Ceres, on which Sykes and six other members of the Planetary Science Institute were part of the science team.

The Phoenix Mars lander and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid recovery mission are examples of small, competed missions that were run from Tucson by the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, he said.

Eleven such missions are currently operating, but nearing the end of their science programs, he said. “In 2020, there will be one — OSIRIS-REx.”

“And so we face an uncontrolled collapse of a chunk of our profession here, and that’s something to be concerned about,” he said.

When scientists leave planetary science they pursue other fields, he said, and they don’t come back. He himself always had an exit strategy.

Sykes attended law school at the UA while working at Steward and singing opera. He served an externship with the late U.S. District Judge Alfredo Marquez and was admitted to the Arizona Bar.

“I went to law school, in part, because I wanted to have a backup plan,” Sykes said.

Yes, he is also a lawyer, in addition to his singing, his CEO duties, and his research on asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust and other small bodies in the solar system.

That includes Pluto. He has been a strong voice for restoration of its planetary status.

On Sundays, he bakes. Monday’s offerings at the PSI office were blueberry-oatmeal cookies. They were quite good.