History

MIT scientists and engineers began preparations for space research with rockets and satellites soon after the founding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958.

In 1959, members of the Rossi Cosmic Ray Group submitted proposals to NASA for exploratory satellite experiments to measure interplanetary plasma and search for high-energy cosmic gamma rays. Studies to support manned space flight were proposed by members of the Aero-Astro Department beginning in 1962. Inertial navigation and guidance were under development in the instrumentation laboratory and experiments in space communications, radio and radar astronomy were underway at Lincoln Laboratory and the Research Laboratory of Electronics. The need to focus space research efforts and to provide more stable support became the subject of conversations between the Administrator of NASA, James Webb, and MIT President Julius Stratton in 1961. These led to a proposal for a Center for Space Research (CSR) submitted to NASA in April 1963. It was accepted, amazingly, only two months later in June 1963. A founder and the first director was Prof. John V. Harrington of the Electrical Engineering and Aero-Astro Departments.

CSR was initially located in two old buildings north of campus (N51-52). Its new home on the main campus, Building 37, was completed in 1967 and dedicated on April 25, 1968. Offices and laboratories on the fifth and sixth floors were occupied by the Cosmic Ray Group, and on the third and fourth floors by Aero-Astro groups including the Man-Vehicle Laboratory (MVL). A Planetary Astronomy Laboratory also found a home there. Gravitation and observational cosmology research was undertaken in Building 20. Researchers in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences have had a continuing strong role in CSR/MKI. Over the next decades, these and other groups associated with CSR/MKI have developed and executed space experiments on sounding rockets, balloons, satellites and manned space vehicles and also instruments for ground-based observatories.

The space in N51-52 was retained by CSR until about 1983 for the fabrication of space experiments. In 1989, when engineering space was needed for the RXTE mission, space was rented in Kendall Square in Building NE83, which is still being used as laboratory and office space. In 2004, the LIGO Gravitational wave research moved from Building 20 to NW17, and expanded in following years into NW22. In a December 1986 re-dedication, Building 37 was named after Ronald McNair, the MIT PhD graduate and scientist astronaut who died in the 1986 Shuttle Challenger accident.

The earliest research efforts of the center were in the fields of gamma-ray astronomy, X-ray astronomy, interplanetary plasma, humans in space, and radio-wave propagation in space. As the years passed, the astrophysics research in MKI grew to incorporate an array of programs including ground, balloon, and space based optical and far-IR astronomy, radio, gravitational waves, and theoretical studies. Some of these were already underway at MIT under the umbrella of other organizations, i.e., the Research Laboratory for Electronics, Center for Theoretical Physics, and the Departments of Mathematics and the Earth and Planetary Sciences. The organization thus evolved into a true center of astrophysics. A major refurbishment of the top floor of the McNair Building (37) in 2001 eliminated laboratories in favor of airy comfortable spaces for the integration of faculty and students. In 2004, a major endowment grant from the Kavli Foundation led to the renaming of the Center for Space Research (CSR); it became the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI).

During the early hardware-building years (circa 1964–1983), a subsidiary organization, the Laboratory for Space Experiments, existed to carry out hardware projects. After about 1983, these projects were directed by project managers reporting to the Associate Director. The projects were and are executed by an MKI staff consisting of a few professional engineers and technicians supplemented by additional personnel as needed for the project at hand. The end products of these efforts find themselves in space or at distant ground-based sites (e.g., in Chile or Australia) acquiring data sought by the proposing scientists.