Since the four-person crew of Artemis II splashed back down to Earth last month, all things space are front of mind for a lot of us. While the space centers in Texas and Florida may be busy poring through the data the astronauts brought back, right here in Cambridge, the quest to learn more about space is also alive.

Read more Should City Council weigh in on foreign policy?

Andrew Szentgyorgyi, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), is developing a new tool that will measure how heavy Earth-like planets in other solar systems are. The tool, called a Consortium Large Earth Finder, will be installed in the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is slated to be the largest optical telescope and is under construction in Chile.

Szentgyorgyi is motivated by wanting to find another planet like Earth, one that orbits a Sun-like star and is far enough from it to possibly have life-giving liquid water on its surface, he said. It’s why the G-CLEF, as it’s being called, will search for evidence of life, like oxygen, in the atmospheres of these other planets.

It will also search for remnants, or “fossils, [from] the origins of the universe that are present in our galaxy today,” said Szentgyorgyi, the principal investigator of G-CLEF.

“The ability to contribute to answering one of the bigger questions of mankind is why I became an astronomer,” Szentgyorgyi said. “You need to be able to look up in the sky and understand where we came from and why we’re here.

“We have terrible social problems because [of] scarcity of material things and pollution, but it’s all meaningless if you don’t understand why you’re human.”

Szentgyorgyi began brainstorming for the G-CLEF in 2006 and developing it began in 2008.

In 2012, G-CLEF was selected to be one of the first instruments installed on the Giant Magellan Telescope. Following its selection, a formal review process started through the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at the CfA, requiring a refined G-CLEF design to be resubmitted every two to two-and-a-half years, to make sure the team got it right before development.

In 2018, the team reached the final design review for the largest components of G-CLEF, the spectrographs, which are instruments that separates and records light into its separate wavelengths.

Read more Baldwin School boosts enrollment, classroom shuffling to come

But the COVID-19 pandemic two years later stalled progress significantly and “in some cases slowed delivery of critical components by three years or more,” Szentgyorgyi said.

Today, the major components of G-CLEF are complete, but a few more pieces will take another year or so to develop and the entire CLEF should be complete in approximately two years.

Szentgyorgyi may consider his biggest contribution to be something non-astrophysics related due to his early career background. He originally was an art student in college, but dropped out due to tuition costs. Then, he had a bunch of odd jobs, including one at a physics laboratory, which led him to return to college to study astrophysics. When working in x-ray astronomy years later, someone spontaneously asked if he’d like to work on astronomical instrumentation, which ultimately led to his work on G-CLEF.

All those changes have meant that he has himself developed the “patience and persistence to provide continuity and consistency” throughout the G-CLEF’s development stages.

Szentgyorgyi is “so unbelievably refreshing” to work with “because he comes from a very different walk of life” than the typical born and bred astrophysicist and allowed him to build “very creative groups building really interesting instruments,” said Juliana Garcia-Mejia, who, as a graduate student at Harvard from 2017 to 2019, helped calculate the feasibility of G-CLEF detecting oxygen on another planet. 

There is a “lightness” to Szentgyorgyi and he is an “amazing advisor and supporter” of his students at Harvard as well as the G-CLEF project, Garcia-Mejia said. Szentgyorgyi is “building a team to ensure that his legacy actually makes it to the telescope,” said Garcia-Mejia, who recently joined the G-CLEF team to take on a role similar to Szentgyorgyi’s.

His dedication to the G-CLEF project is especially evident as Szentgyorgyi prepares for G-CLEF development and installation to continue after he retires, she said. Szentgyorgyi, 71, does not plan to retire anytime soon, but he believes having a backup plan is important.

Spearheading the G-CLEF project is the “culmination of my career” and “the biggest thing I started all by myself,” Szentgyorgyi said. The ultimate reward will be “the gratification of possibly actually seeing [G-CLEF] get built someday.”

Read more ‘Beloved’ Elow missed; was under internal investigation