This week on Arizona Illustrated a golf course in Oro Valley returns back to nature thanks to some local activism.

If you can't have a golf course, what's the next best thing?

Field notes on our producer David Festers ongoing relationship with Mushroom.

I think the greatest gift they've given me is to introduce me to all the rest of non-human nature.

Some of the most exciting missions in space spearheaded right here in Tucson.

It's a pretty incredible privilege to wake up every day and explore space and our Favorite Places series takes us to the Mirror Lab.

The only place in the world where these mirrors are made is right here on the campus of the University of Arizona.

Hello and welcome to another all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and thanks for joining us from Honey Bee Canyon and beautiful Oro Valley.

You know, the town is home to 47,000 people, including my family.

When we moved here 25 years ago, there were barely 20,000 people in town.

Oro Valley sits between The Tortalita mountains and the Catalinas and has sweeping views of both ranges.

Many residents take advantage of the proximity to nature through the town's many bike paths and hiking trails and parks.

These public areas also double as wildlife corridors Now, recently, when the Vistoso golf course closed, residents noticed wildlife coming through the area more consistently.

So they organized and fought to save the area from development and preserve it as the natural habitat they had come to love [Guitar music] (Pat) We knew that it would never be a golf course again.

We decided that since it was 70% desert and it was a beautiful desert golf course, that it was totally worth saving as a nature preserve.

(Andy) These are putting out a lot of flowers now and we got fruit coming.

So there'll be more growth in here.

(Gordon) After the golf course closed for a while, it stayed very green and the fairways had still had grass for a while.

They tried to keep it going in case a buyer could buy it.

Then we gradually noticed that it was turning into a more of a Sonoran Desert environment.

But the animals still remained.

It was a wildlife corridorr.

We noticed that they transit by our place every day or two.

Herds of mule deer, little family packs of Javelina and coyotes.

So it was just like a a wildlife TV show.

Live.

You see bicycle riders, you see walkers all along the six miles of the former cart path.

We've spent 2019 organizing growing our members.

We now have 1850 members of Preserve Vistoso.

And then in 2020 we demonstrated to the town that we were pretty serious about this.

In March, the property owner filed to rezone almost half of this property with either houses and or a senior living center in the middle of one area where the driving range was.

We of course were totally opposed to it.

It was COVID time, so we had to do Zoom and emails and we sent 1300 emails to the town of Oro Valley.

We tested the strength of their Zoom calls with hundreds of people attending, and we went to town council meetings and said, No, no, no, this cannot you cannot change the zoning to allow all these houses here.

It will break off the wildlife corridor and it will ruin what we know as this beautiful nature preserve.

One of our members went and got the Conservation Fund, which is a nationally recognized organization to come here.

And they were so impressed, I think, by what we were doing that they decided to help us.

Once you get the trees in like over there, then you're going to be okay, right?

[Soft piano music] We wanted to do a survey of the plants and animals here at the preserve.

You know, how did it.

What did it look like when it started off?

What were the kind of the ecology of the place when it started off?

So we only had about 20, 20 different kinds of plants and animal species.

And I just we now have a patriotic 1776 observations of 328 species.

(Pat) We raised the money to purchase this sum, almost $2 million the community raised to purchase this, to allow the Conservation Fund to purchase this.

They purchase it, put it into a nature conservancy.

And we they closed in February, I believe, on the property and donated to the town on July 8th.

And now we're in the planning stages and we're so excited about what this can be.

[Bright guitar music] We want people to come here and enjoy the space and learn in the space and and meditate and exercise all of those things where when you leave, it leaves a lasting impression in your heart and that there's no other place like this in our community.

And so they want to come back again next time and explore a different area and see how it's changed from the spring to the fall.

Get down to the native soil, put it on the slopes of the rain comes in.

I started taking pictures with my little Nikon camera.

They were turning out very nicely, especially we had a big Saguaro cactus out back that was kind of a focus point for all the wildlife.

We get pictures of all the birds sitting on the cactus, one of them a dove nesting in the cactus, screech owl in the Cactus Woodpecker family that has had two or three sets of babies every year.

We've been here and we watched them.

So that's been kind of a really good experience.

And here's the mesquite tree that's flowering again because, (Andy) You know, some people probably wondered whether it really was that much of a nature preserve was it worth preserving.

But you can see this is a lot of different kinds of plants and animals that live here and it really is a valuable thing and it will get better, as as the rest of the old golf course goes back to nature.

If you can't have a golf course, what's the next best thing?

And we and we've grown to love the concept of having a community area where we can walk with kids or with a bicycle.

You can have bicycle riders, the kids cross here if you go to school, it's just a wonderful community property.

[Music fades, birds call in the distance] Arizona Illustrated producer David Fenster is passionate about fungi and filmmaking.

In this edition of his Field Notes series, he looks back on a 15 year love affair with mushrooms and shares excerpts from the many films he's made on the subject It's a misty morning up on Mt.

Lemmon It's August.

The creeks are all flowing.

We've had a lot of rain lately.

And the mushrooms are out.

This is Boletus barrowsii.

The white king bolete.

A delicious edible mushroom.

I got into mushrooms about 15 years ago after seeing this book.

All That the Rain Promises and More... written by this guy, David Arora.

Here he is mushroom hunting in an outfit made out of tree bark.

I'd never seen a book quite like this.

It was a highly regarded field guide, but it also had sections on dying your dog with pigments derived from mushrooms and haiku poetry.

It was as much a portrait of the mushroom hunting community as it was a portrait of the mushrooms.

David Arora let me tag along on a foray with him several years ago, and I got to make a film about him and the book.

This is on page 150.

This one's called the hideous gomphidius If you dig it up at the base, it's going to be bright yellow.

See that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the bright yellow base... At the end of the day, he cooked up some porcini mushrooms we had found, over the fire.

Boletus edulis, very similar to the boletus species I just found on Mt.

Lemmon.

This wasn't the first film I'd made about mushrooms, including this video you're watching right now.

I've made nine videos about mushrooms and mycology the study of fungi.

Initially, I was attracted to their forms and colors.

I just couldn't believe what I was seeing in these books existed.

And I could go find these things out on a hike.

This is wood ear.

It's a popular ingredient in Chinese cuisine.

And this is witches butter.

Apparently, it's edible, but completely tasteless.

I've never tried it.

It seemed really important to me at one point to film mushrooms spinning around.

My friend, who's an electrical engineer, built me this portable turntable to take out into the forest.

This is an earth star.

Earth stars and puffballs, which are similar, don't have gills, and they emit trillions of spores when their fruit bodies burst open in response to impacts like falling raindrops.

This footage is from a film called Puffballs and Earth Stars.

I had some musician friends create a score for the film.

Around this time, I started to meet more mushroom enthusiasts.

This is a film I made about Bob Cummings, a mycologist who lives in California.

I also started to realize that people interested in mushrooms are very distracted drivers.

Yep.

Can't tell what it is.

I'm going to pull over right here.

Pop them off the log here.

And this is bioluminescent, too.

If you take it into a dark closet, sit with it tonight.

You should do that.

And just watch it.

Maybe take a picture of it.

You get those gills glowing.

Pretty bright green.

Pretty fun to watch.

Funniest things you find on the road.

Going home.

Bioluminescence was just one of the many incredible properties of mushrooms.

Of course, their psychedelic effects are well known.

Gisela Telis and I made this video about psilocybin mushrooms being used to treat OCD.

I, I feel like my OCD is, like, spiraling out of control.

Like, and then.

So week five, he gives me a pill, and I'm laying there like 15, 20 minutes go by and like 30 minutes and like, my spine just starts tingling.

My brain starts tingling.

It's like on Star Wars when they hit light speed All the lights just start flying by.

And I was like, Oh, my God.

So this is what normal state of consciousness looks like after someone was given a placebo or a sugar pill.

This is what the brain looks like under the acute influence of psilocybin or magic mushrooms.

Mushrooms seem to have come into vogue in the United States in the last five or ten years, but when I got interested in them, they were generally ignored or despised.

That's not the case in every country.

In Italy Mushrooms have been revered for centuries.

It's ironic that when I visited Italy, I was most interested in finding a mushroom called the basket stinkhorn, which emits a terrible smell After visiting other places and seeing how other cultures relate to mushrooms I got really interested in how Americans relate to mushrooms.

This film, called Fly Amanita is about an Amanita muscaria mushroom, lamenting the deterioration of his species relationship to humans Basically, I'm a reproductive organ.

I'm a mushroom, a fungus.

I'm part of a bigger organism that is mostly underground.

Now, we're mostly known through cartoons, children's cartoons like the Smurfs or video games like Super Mario Brothers.

I don't know.

It seems perhaps it's deteriorated a little the relationship.

After 15 years I'm still interested in mushrooms, but I think the greatest gift they've given me is to introduce me to all the rest of non-human nature To find and identify mushrooms You have to be able to identify trees because lots of mushrooms will only grow with specific kinds of trees.

So I got interested in trees and learned about trees.

And then I became interested in forests and the birds that live in forests, and the insects.

And then I got interested in ecology and how everything connects to each other.

And I feel like mushrooms were my gateway into all that.

So thanks mushrooms.

And here's to another 15 years together.

Arizona Public Media has been following the Osiris-Rex mission, spearheaded at the University of Arizona years before the mission actually launched in 2016.

The goal was to collect a sample from the asteroid venue and return it to Earth next year.

But that won't be the end of the spacecraft's mission.

NASA's just announced an extended mission called Osiris Apex.

That mission will be led by Dani Dellagiustina, who you're about to meet.

She started on the Osiris Mission's way back as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona.

(Interviewer) Do you see yourself as a P.I.

on a mission someday?

(Dani) I won't discount anything.

[music] (Dante) In exactly 999 days from this moment, our launch window will open up and OSIRIS-REx will be on his journey into the inner solar system to asteroid Bennu.

(Dani) So I was first involved in the OSIRIS family as an undergraduate student here at the University of Arizona.

But when the opportunity did develop to join the OSIRIS-REx team as a junior image processing scientist, I jumped on it.

(Mission control intercom) Status check.

Go, Atlas.

Go Centaur.

Go OSIRIS-REx.

(Dani) And so I became the lead image processing scientist for the mission.

My name is Dani DellaGiustina, and I'm the lead image processing scientist for the OSIRIS-REx Mission.

It is my first time watching the launch of a NASA mission, so I am thrilled.

I'm super excited.

(Announcer) And lift off of OSIRIS-REx.

It's a seven year mission to boldly go to the asteroid Bennu and back.

(Dani) It was a big learning experience for me, but also a lot of fun and really solidified that this is something that I want to do.

(Mission control intercom) O-REx MSA on O-REx Ops.

O-REx has descended below the five meter mark.

Hazard maps is go for tag.

(Woman from Tag Team) And we have touched down.

[applause] (Dani) And then shortly after we departed Bennu, I stepped into the role as deputy principal investigator.

Now getting to lead as principal investigator of the next phase of this OSIRIS journey with OSIRIS-APEX is really exciting.

So OSIRIS-APEX is an extended mission that will follow on the heels of the OSIRIS-REx NASA mission.

After the sample is brought back and dropped off on Earth, the spacecraft doesn't really have a purpose.

And so last year we proposed to NASA to continue to use the spacecraft, send it to a new object, an asteroid called Apophis, which it will rendezvous with in 2029.

And we're changing our name from OSIRIS-REx, which stood for origins, spectral interpretation, resource identification, security, regolith explorer to OSIRIS-APEX where APEX stands for the Apophis Explorer.

Asteroid Apophis is a pretty infamous object because when it was discovered in 2004, there was an initial scare that it might impact the Earth in 2029.

It's a very close, approaching asteroid.

And later observations of Apophis that same year indicated, no, it's not going to impact the Earth in 2029.

However, it will get within 1/10 of the distance between the earth and the moon, and we'll be able to see it with the naked eye here on Earth.

It represents this class of potentially hazardous asteroids well in a couple of key ways.

And we think that during the 2029 close encounter with our own planet, where it gets this close, that it might get disturbed by that gravitational tug that our own planet is exerting on it.

And so we're really excited to send a spacecraft there to observe the effects of this and also just to characterize it as an analog for other potentially hazardous objects.

We are also doing a couple of sporty things with the spacecraft.

So at Apophis we plan to get really close, turn our thrusters up, move a lot of material on the surface, and then back away and take another look.

We want to see what it subsurface looks like and we're excited for this spacecraft maneuver that is going to help us do that.

It's a pretty incredible privilege to wake up every day and explore space.

We're taking images often of an object that nobody's ever seen before or at scales that are unprecedented.

And so I am the first human in existence to witness something, and that is just nuts and so cool.

And I never get tired of it.

And that's why I'm a scientist, because I am just addicted to that feeling.

And I am so excited that I can continue to do this type of exploration at Apophis.

Water reclamation is the process of converting municipal wastewater or sewage into water that can be used for a variety of purposes.

Here's a behind the scenes look at what the process looks like at Tucson Water and the many places that water is used.

The reclaimed water system at Tucson is one of the oldest in the state of Arizona.

It was initiated in 1983.

There were a lot of golf courses in the area.

They were heavy water users.

So by getting golf courses in particular on the reclaimed water system, it provided that renewable water to those golf courses.

So they didn't have to rely on groundwater or the drinking water supply to operate.

If you look at a map of how our pipes are laid out in the reclaim system, the end of every major pipe is usually a destination resort golf course or a city golf course located in the area.

But when we built those pipes to reach those golf courses, we strategically made the pipes go to pick up schoolyards city parks, county parks, other large turf uses in the community so multiple facilities could be converted to the reclaimed water system.

[flowing water] And the other place where recycled water is used is in our Santa Cruz River Heritage Project.

So that is reclaimed water being discharged into the Santa Cruz downtown.

Since 1983, we've expanded the reclaim system throughout the whole region.

We deliver between ten and 14,000 acre feet of reclaimed water to sites throughout the community.

The city of Tucson's reclaimed water system uses a class A water and at many time its class A-plus.

The plus means that it's fully denitrified that would meet the drinking water standards.

We don't recommend drinking reclaimed water because we don't do the testing like we do on the potable side.

But it is the highest class of renewable water that you can use in the state of Arizona.

The Favorite Places series is a collaboration between the Southern Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects the Arizona Daily Star, and this program in the story you're about to see, architect Elaine Becherer speaks thoughtfully and personally about why the Mirror Lab is one of her favorite places This is a story about telescopes, mirrors and innovation, but also about the overlooked buildings within our built environment that support and house the state of the art technology that is transforming our community and changing the world.

This is not a story about a high design building.

It is about bringing to focus the balance that design spaces and buildings are an iteration between requirements and solutions.

And often the function of the space is the real beauty.

The University of Arizona Football Stadium was originally built in 1928, in 1985, with financial support primarily from the United States Air Force, the National Science Foundation and the University of Arizona.

The Mirror lab moved to the current facility under the east wing of the U of A football stadium.

These mirrors represent a radical departure from the conventional solid glass mirrors used in the past.

Having a honeycomb structure on the inside made from glass that is melted, molded and spun cast into the shape of a parabola.

These mirrors have similar attributes as their solid counterparts, rigidity and stability, but they can be significantly larger and dramatically lighter.

The University of Arizona is the center of telescope, research and world leading large optic laboratories, along with the Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory and the Wyatt College of Optical Sciences.

One of its current projects is the Giant Magellan Telescope that will be among the largest ground based telescopes ever constructed.

To capture enough photons to see billions of light years across the universe with enough clarity.

The GMT project requires the creation of seven enormous mirror segments, a center segment and six off axis segments that surround it.

Each GMT mirror segment is 8.4 meters in diameter, weighs 16 tons and takes about six years to complete, including the casting, polishing and testing processes.

Maybe a creative use of the term in the real estate world, but between the football stadium, lab, athletic training facility and restaurant club, this is truly a mixed use site.

The mirror lab made the decision to leverage underutilized space on campus and built the lab within an existing structure which created project budget savings.

Functional structural elements can be added to existing structures when required, and mundane boxes can be nestled into the unused shadows of a football stadium.

From the onset due to the existing structure and uses on site, the design required a solution that supported the functionality of the lab within existing constraints.

The space needed to cast, transport, polish and test an 8.4 meter diameter mirror.

The only place in the world where these mirrors are made is right here on the campus of the University of Arizona.

The Mirror Lab is my favorite place because I see the opportunity to describe and highlight through an architectural perspective, a one of a kind Tucson asset that sets our region apart.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you next week for another all new episode.