Astronomers mourn the end of an infrared observatory that flew aboard a jumbo jet. It was expensive, but it saw what Earth-based telescopes can’t.
eight years, a modified Boeing 747 jetliner has flown hundreds of flights on a unique mission: carrying a 19-ton, 2.5-meter telescope known as Sofia, or the. Flying a telescope on a jumbo jet offered a way to peer into the heavens at wavelengths that could not be glimpsed from the ground—but the ticket was expensive. So yesterday, NASA and the German space agency grounded the mission.
Sofia was an innovative way to gaze at the infrared universe. Infrared light is essentially heat radiation—but astronomers can’t probe cosmic objects like dust-enshrouded stars and galaxies without the water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere absorbing that light. That confounds attempts to observe those objects with telescopes built on mountaintops, like the observatories in Hawaii and Chile.
“Almost 50 percent of the energy of the universe comes out in the mid- to far infrared. Sofia has played an important and unique role for its lifetime, probing that entire wavelength range, and we’ve been able to observe all manner of phenomena that were otherwise invisible to other facilities,” says Jim De Buizer, Sofia senior scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
De Buizer and the Sofia team have made a number of significant astronomical discoveries, including measuring cosmic magnetic fields permeating nearby galaxies, charting the
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