I have some great news about NASA! I have it on excellent word that the SOFIA mission is on!
SOFIA is the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy — it’s literally a telescope mounted in an airplane. A door in the side of the plane opens, and the telescope looks out. Earth’s nasty water vapor layer which absorbs most IR, so the plane flies above that, and is stable enough for astronomical observations.
SOFIA has not yet been built. It’s had cost overruns and technical difficulties which have slowed the production, and NASA was giving it the evil eye pretty seriously, considering chopping it from the budget. There has been a lot of, um, interesting back and forth between NASA administration and the SOFIA team over the past few months about this.
So, NASA has an Advisory Committee (the NAC) which meets to discuss what to fund, what to plan, what to delay, etc. On Thursday morning, Mike Griffin announced at the latest meeting that the SOFIA project will continue. Last month, NASA announced that there were no technological hurdles left to overcome, but given the past issues, that was not a guarantee for funding. But now SOFIA will be flying high.
Of course, NASA’s budget is fixed, so any more money to one program means another will suffer. In this case, it’s the Navigator program, which encompasses several missions, including the much-anticipated Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) which will look for planets around other stars. These missions will be delayed somewhat. That’s a bummer, but on the up side it does give more time to engineers and planners to figure out the very advanced tech needed to build SIM. I’m not trying to blow smoke– it sucks to get delayed, but it could be far worse, as missions like NuSTAR have seen (it was cancelled within weeks of finalizing the mission proposal).
This reorg of Navigator will free up some funds needed by other missions, like GLAST (a gamma ray satellite I happen to work on), JWST (the successor to Hubble), and others.
I didn’t get word on when SOFIA will fly, but I assume it will be before the end of next year, and most likely much earlier than that.
Wow. It’s nice to report good news once in a while! My sincere congrats to the SOFIA team, and I’m hoping to see some dynamite infrared images from the observatory very soon.
July 7th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
This looks like the same basic design as the Kuiper observatory (which I’m sure has been decommissioned by now). That one was based on a C-141 Starlifter and had the ‘scope port in front of the wing (to cut down diffraction from turbulence).
Is this sort of a “next generation” of the KAO?
- Jack
July 7th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
Earth’s water vapor layer which absorbs most IR, isn’t nasty at all. If that disappeared, you would not be happy at all.
July 7th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
“We got some ************* telescopes on this plane!”
Sorry the pottymouth. Sounds great.
July 7th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
>SOFIA has not yet been built.
IIRC it has been built. I remember chatting with a SOFIA staff member at the AAS meeting in Washington. The telescope’s mounted in the plane and I think they were ready to start test flights later this fall.
July 7th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
The telescope is built. But until it’s integrated with the plane, it’s not really SOFIA.
July 7th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
This has nothing, much, to do with this blog topic, but you guys, I just saw the space shuttle, hooked up to the International Space Station, flying over Studio City, California, and I had to tell somebody. I’ve been watching it off and on on the NASA channel, and decided to set my alarm to remind me to go out and LOOK UP. At first I was looking at a star or planet or something up there that I THOUGHT was the shuttle/space station, but it was the wrong thing. When the shuttle finally was flying over, there was no mistaking. It was in motion, heading toward the moon, passed behind the moon, and kept going until it was out of sight. That was fun. Total naked eye; usually I can’t see well enough to see meteors or comets — this was a neat experience.
July 8th, 2006 at 1:56 am
Well, for SOFIA they need to make sure to comply with Airline regulations things. That’s the only major sort of obstacle to overcome. This all things are done because people want to do some outreach as well on that same plane. This info is again from one of the members of SOFIA team
July 8th, 2006 at 4:43 am
Wendy, I think you meant ‘passed in front of the moon’
Well done though for spotting it. Btw if you don’t already know, this is a great site to use for finding all sorts of stuff:
http://www.heavens-above.com/
July 8th, 2006 at 9:00 am
[...] The Bad Astronomer has the scoop. Last month, SOFIA posted some news about having passed a technical and programmatic review that made it more likely to continue to have funding. During a NASA Advisory Committee meeting on Thursday, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin announced that it will get funding. This comes at a price, as Phil Plait explains. [...]
July 8th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Thanks, Roy, for the attaboy! I woke up thinking about where the moon was, especially this morning watching the astronauts do repairs and layups! It was fun to see them passing overhead, even if I was a little fuzzy on their orientation to the moon. Heavens Above is very cool. This evening the space station and the shuttle will be visible from my city a little after 9:30 p.m.
This time I will know better what to look for;-)
July 8th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
I’ll be off-topic also.
Keep looking up Wendy, the ISS is only one of many marvels (most of which are not man-made) to look at. I too love watching flyovers of the ISS and imagining what it would be like to be on board or seeing an Iridium flare (man-made object) is also lots of fun but get your eyes to some good binoculars or a telescope and really be amazed. It’s a big universe out there.
Clear skies
July 10th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Yeah, SOFIA is basically the KAO follow-on. KAO was decommissioned many years ago, as SOFIA was starting. More or less, the money that was supporting KAO became SOFIA money (or so I understand it).
I flew on the KAO back in 1994, out of New Zealand, where driving on the left didn’t bother me, but the upside-down moon was weird! At the time, the aircraft was being refurbished, and there was no internal skin or insulation at the experimenter’s station. So there was only 6 feet of air and a sixteenth inch of aluminum between us and the port inboard engine. It was seriously loud! And cold!
The magnetic torquers that keep the telescope pointed as the aircraft jiggles were on the pressurized side of the bulkhead, so you could watch them move. Even though the mirror was only about 1m diameter (IIRC), that was still a lot of mass, and moment of inertia, to be yanked around as fast as it was. Very impressive.
Also it was fun knowing that the plane’s navigation system was being controlled by the experimenter’s telescope guide system. We laughed at the commercial airlines’ “shut off all electronic devices”! “Ha ha!” we went.
Sure am glad SOFIA is back on, even though I stay away from those wimpy infrared photons these days.
July 10th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
i have a question: is that artist’s rendering of the 747/scope combination accurate? it sure looks like a stubby plane. maybe a few (or 30) feet of fuselage behind the wing got left out in the picture? i don’t know, i’m just asking because it doesn’t really look like a flyer.
July 10th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
dre, yes it’s shorter than a typical 747. According to the official site, it’s an “SP” model, extra stubby for longer range. Here’s a nice big photo of the plane.
July 10th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
wow. I’m stunned that this would even work.
Seriously, how exactly do you build a mount system that will retain any useful pointing accuracy when on board an aircraft?
As an amateur astrophotgrapher, I’m well aquainted with the challenges of tracking at even modest focal lengths whilst sitting on *solid ground*. That this can be made to work just boggles the mind.
It saddens me a little that most people will be completely oblivious to the magnitude of engineering challenge that this represents… but I sincerely wish the team the best, and I’m looking forward to the results.
July 11th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Here’s my attempt at using the HTML tags. Apologies in advance if it’s not readable.
July 11th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
OK, it didn’t work. What was quoted above was my responses to Johnny Vector’s description of flying on the KAO. I guess I really don’t understand how this works. What I thought I was quoting gets deleted and what I was adding gets quoted. [Sigh]
- Jack