Airborne observatory

Transcription

[ Music ] >> Pamela Marcum: I think of SOFIA mostly as sort of catching light. >> Brent Cobleigh: Day after day we can get up and do these missions and really do really cutting edge astronomy in the infrared spectrum. [ Music ] SOFIA is an observatory. And like other observatories around the world, it can do a lot of different science. A lot of those observatories are on the tops of mountains around 13,000 or 14,000 feet. >> Michael Person: Even when we have a ground-based telescope in a perfect place, sometimes it doesn't get any data because the clouds come in. Being able to fly over all of that is just a tremendous asset. >> Pamela Marcum: What happens is in the upper atmosphere of the Earth, as the light comes down, you know, from some astronomical object, very little of that light is able to pass all the way down to the ground. So what SOFIA does is it flies above the bulk of that water in the atmosphere. [ Music ] >> Brent Cobleigh: SOFIA can fly at 43,000 feet, more than double the height of all of the other observatories in the world. >> Eddie Zavala: And that is above 90% of the water vapor. And that's a position that is necessary for astronomers to do infrared astronomy. [ Music ] >> Brent Cobleigh: The space-based observatories have some really unique aspects to them. They're always in space. They're very cold. They can observe round the clock day in and day out. >> Alois Himmes: The spacecraft demand on low weight, low power consumption are very extreme so in an airborne observatory you have a lot of power, a lot of space available. [ Music ] >> Brent Cobleigh: We can carry instruments that are hundreds of pounds. We can give those instruments much more power than you can generate from solar collectors in space. We're not limited to the minimum weight that launch vehicles require to put something in to space. We can fix those instruments day after day. The airplane comes home. We can repair them. It's very, very challenging to ever repair anything in space. And it has been done very, very few times. [ Background Discussion ] >> Pamela Marcum: The plane provides this motion as the telescope provides this motion. And together you're actually able to track a target as it moves across the sky as it's rising and setting. Not only does it have to be aware of time and position, but it's also got to be making the right motions across the surfaces of the Earth so that combined motions allow us to be able to lock on to the object over periods of a couple of hours. One of the powerful benefits that SOFIA brings us is the ability to go chasing these occultations in a way that no other observatory can do. [ Music ] >> Eddie Zavala: An occultation is basically a situation where a planet or an object of interest moves in front of a background star. >> Pamela Marcum: We observed a Pluto occultation, so that was where Pluto fell in our line of sight with the background star and made that star's light blink out very momentarily. >> Eddie Zavala: They modeled where that shadow is going to be, and we flew this airplane at roughly 500 miles an hour to catch a shadow that was going across the surface of the Earth at 53,000 miles an hour. >> Pamela Marcum: Simply by looking at the way that the background light blinked out, tells us something about the shape of the object, whether that object has an atmosphere or not, and even determine things like how the atmosphere's temperature and pressure vary from the ground all the way up to the top of that atmosphere on that object. [ Music ] You are limited as to what parts of the sky you can actually observe when you're in the Northern Hemisphere. So deployments out of our home base here in Palmdale gives us access to one half of the sphere. And when we go down to New Zealand, we'll have access to a whole new set of objects, a whole new part of the sky. [ Music ] Infrared astronomy allows you to peer into the core of really cold gas clouds where the stars are starting to form, planets, comets, dust particles...to look at star formation in extreme regions. These things, because of their cold temperatures, happen to radiate most of their energy at these infrared wavelengths that SOFIA studies. [ Music ] SOFIA actually has several different instruments. >> Brent Cobleigh: The science instruments receive the electromagnetic spectrum, the light, through the telescope. >> Alois Himmes: Instruments mean cameras or photometers or spectrometers. The telescope without instruments is totally useless. >> Brent Cobleigh: We have a whole team whose job is to prepare the instruments and do a very precise movement, a choreographed movement, of one instrument off the airplane, another one on. >> Pamela Marcum: Some of them make pictures that will look a lot like something that would have come out of a digital camera, but of course at a different wavelength. Others will not look like a picture at all. [ Music ] >> Brent Cobleigh: One of the biggest challenges, of course, is we're putting a large hole in the side of the airplane. >> Alois Himmes: The telescope in total is 17 metric tons. And there's an additional 3 tons distributed in electronic racks all over the aircraft. [ Music ] >>Eddie Zavala: The telescope as a certain level of precision. The instruments require a certain level of precision and accuracy in order to conduct the science. And the engineering challenge of providing that stability on an airplane that is flying and encountering turbulence is a significant challenge. >> Brent Cobleigh: We had major structural modifications that had to happen. We had to add an additional bulkhead just forward of the telescope so that we can maintain a pressure area where people can work. And then the aft area is vented to the outside as we open the door. >> Alois: Himmes: The telescope is operated when the large door is open, so the environment is not very benign. >> Eddie: Zavala: The telescope is something that is designed to free-float. It floats on a spherical bearing. And that allows the telescope to be somewhat isolated from the movement of the aircraft. Inside SOFIA it's like flying on any other airliner. [ Music ] >> Jim Less: We're planning for about a 10-hour mission, hopefully about eight and a half hours' worth of science out of that. >> Brent Cobleigh: We do preflight checks on all the airplane systems and all the observatory systems. Fuel up the airplane. We go into a crew brief in the late afternoons where the entire team that is going to fly on the airplane gets together and talks about the objectives for the flight, status of all the systems, the weather, and the mission plan ahead. The team goes out and does their preflight checks on the airplane, start engines, we take off, climb to altitude, and do whatever mission is planned for that night. Usually it's about a 10-hour flight. >> Pamela Marcum: We know before we even get on the plane what objects are going to be looked at, at exactly what time in the flight they're going to be looked at. It's all sort of planned out and choreographed like a complicated dance routine. [ Music ] >> Eddie Zavala: SOFIA is a unique blend of aeronautical capabilities, science engineering in the form of a state of the art telescope, and then cutting edge science instruments. >> Brent Cobleigh: We have the U.S. /German partnership, which is 80% U.S. and 20% German. >> Alois Himmes: We are responsible for developing and delivering and support the integration of SOFIA's infrared telescope. >> Eddie Zavala: On board there's probably about 20 to 30 personnel along with USRA personnel, our science support personnel, the mission ops. >> Brent Cobleigh: We also have multiple NASA centers, NASA Ames, primarily responsible for the science, and NASA Dryden (Armstrong) responsible for the aircraft operations. It takes that total group of expertise together that makes SOFIA an operational telescope. >> Cris DeWolf: Sometimes I think that my kids think science is done by some person sitting in a lab or up on a mountain with a telescope all by themselves. Having them see that it is really such a team effort I think is important. [ Music ] >> Alois Himmes: Using instruments from Germany doesn't mean that they can only be used by Germans. So those instruments can be used also by U.S. institutions, by other institutions. >> Eddie Zavala: This facility is not being built for NASA. We are providing it for the science community, for future scientists, and for educators. Through those teachers, they're our airborne astronomy ambassadors program, and they'll be able to extend a lot of what we learn on SOFIA into the classroom. [ Music ] >> Pamela Marcum: SOFIA's science is drive by the demands and the imagination of the community. >> Brent Cobleigh: The thing I get satisfaction over is seeing the teams succeed themselves and whether that be technicians installing electrical components or scientists getting the data that they receive or a teacher getting a good experience on board to take back to their classrooms. >> Pamela Marcum: So SOFIA is considered to be an international resource to be used by the global community of astronomers. >> Eddie Zavala: We hope to truly inspire students, scientists, engineers, mechanics, pilots so anyone in a grade school classroom right now, depending on what their interest is, they can see themselves operating SOFIA in the next 10 to 15 years. >> Pamela Marcum: There are a lot of open science questions that have been open for, quite frankly, a very long time. Creativity and inquiry is what's going to lead SOFIA to discovery and to answering a lot of outstanding questions over the next 20 years of its life. [ Music ]