[Ed. Note: In late May of 1997 Louis Frank of the University of Iowa made a startling announcement: instruments on NASA's Polar satellite had detected small comets, no larger than an average house, striking the Earth at the rate of thousands per day, apparently vindicating Frank's earlier claims on the topic from the mid-1980s. On the heels of this announcement, I interviewed Frank in July for an article in Final Frontier magazine. These controversial small comets have since reentered the news as scientists rebutted Frank's findings and Frank himself provided new evidence to support his claims. As the debate over small comets heats up, it's worthwhile to take a look at Frank himself, a man who is one of the more interesting scientists in space physics.]

Despite 11 years of debate and what he considered a scientific ostracism, Louis Frank was magnanimous in what was at least a temporary triumph.
     "I'm not a vindictive person," Frank said in a late July interview, two months after he announced new evidence for his controversial "small comets" at an American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in Baltimore. "I don't believe people who say that when you have something major come along you need vindication."
     For Frank, the "real pleasure of it all" was the seriousness with which the results were met in the scientific community. No longer, he said, could his detractors "rely on the crutch" of instrumental errors. (Ironically, instrumental noise would be blamed for Frank's new observations in December by researchers at the University of Washington and the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.)
     This is little surprise who those who know Frank, a decidedly down-to-Earth scientist who has spent his entire academic career, from his first day of college to his current position as the Carver/James A. Van Allen Professor of Physics, at the University of Iowa. He has staked his career on these small comets, and has worked for over a decade to try to prove to highly skeptical colleagues that the comets exist.

The Battle Over Small Comets
Frank gained fame, and infamy, in 1986 when he announced the existence of these small comet in a presentation at another AGU meeting. Frank based these results on black spots in ultraviolet images of the Earth taken from the Dynamics Explorer 1 satellite. He claimed his analysis showed the Earth was being bombarded with ten million small comets, no larger than a house and weighing 20 to 40 tons each.
     To say his claims were met with incredulity in the scientific community would be an understatement. Frank had few supporters and many actively working to disprove his results. Frank spoke of "10,000 scientists" aligned against him, with only himself and his graduate student, John Sigwarth, in the pro-comet camp.
     A brief battle flared in the pages of journals like Geophysical Research Letters. Based on just those papers it would appear that Frank had been discredited: researchers wrote of a lack of other evidence for small comets, and explained the black spots seen in the Dynamics Explorer 1 images as instrumental error.
     Frank, though, would not give up on the small comet research. He continued his studies of the Dynamics Explorer data and other projects, while working on a number of other projects in space physics (outside of the small comets episode, Frank had gained a positive reputation working on everything from the Earth's aurora to Saturn's plasma ring). Unable to find an audience in scientific literature, Frank wrote a book on the subject, The Big Splash, published in 1990.
     The Polar spacecraft, launched in February 1996, was Frank's next chance to get evidence for small comets. Frank and Sigwarth soon found black spots in images from Polar's ultraviolet camera, much like those seen in the earlier data. Frank, though, expressed no surprise over the finding. "We just knew they had to be there," he said.
     More than a year after those early images, Frank released the new data, including visible-light images of small comet breakups high above the Earth, to a surprised public. This time Frank was not entirely alone: his results were trumpeted in a NASA press release, which included a laudatory quote from a former critic, Thomas Donahue of the University of Michigan.
     While Frank believe the small comets existed all along, the announcement of the new data was something of a relief to him. "When you have 10,000 scientists on your back for a tenth of a century, there's a certain amount of stress," he said.

Work Takes Its Toll
Frank, who admitted to working many late nights in the last 10 years ("I'm an old grad student at heart," he said) often dealt with his stress in unorthodox ways. Disdainful of the ivory tower atmosphere of the university, he would often get into his old pickup truck and drive to bars in towns along the Mississippi River, more than a hour away from Iowa City.
     "The world is a lot more than me sitting here in this office in this university," he explained. In the bars he would run across "all various aspects of life", from lawyers to truck drivers to bikers. "They have their own troubles, their own lives," he said. "They keep my mind open."
     Frank stills feels burned by what he felt was the shoddy treatment he received from fellow scientists and publishers of journals during the 11 years between his two announcements of small comets. In the early 1980s, before the small comets controversy, Frank described himself as like a kid with "youthful innocence" and enthusiasm to do science, experiencing joy when he successfully solved a problem.
     Since then, though, Frank has become disillusioned with the scientific process. "I've lost my innocence," he said. "If you get ridiculed by 10,000 scientists, you don't have that fresh, young kid wanting to go in and do that."
     The experience has also stripped Frank of his love of science. "I am a science machine now," he explained. "I finish a problem and go on to the next one. The joys I got when I solved problems are gone."
     While the joy is gone, the work continues. At the December 1997 AGU meeting several teams of scientists provided new evidence to counter Frank's latest claims. In addition to the two groups who sought to explain Frank's results as instrument noise, three teams from the University of Arizona and the U.S. Geological Survey found no evidence for small comets in three areas: no sign of clouds that should be visible from comet breakups, no elevated levels of certain noble gases like argon, and a lack of evidence of small comet impacts on the Moon.
     Frank has no intention of giving up, though. He presented new evidence for small comets at the same AGU meeting, noting that the number of black spots visible in the Polar data was a function of the altitude of the satellite, something that would presumably not be the case if the spots are just noise. However, Frank's "science machine" will have to joylessly grind away for some time to come to conclusively prove, or disprove, the existence of the controversial small comets.