Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. News

NASA’s observatory on a plane, SOFIA, will fly no more

Georgina Torbet
By

NASA has announced it will end operations of its observatory on a plane, SOFIA or the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. The mission, which is a collaboration with German space agency DLR, will come to a close at the end of its current mission extension on September 30, 2022.

SOFIA is a modified Boeing 747 airplane that flies at altitudes of over 7 miles, which is above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere. That allows it to observe without the water vapor distorting readings, and it has been fitted with instruments for looking in the mid to far-infrared. It has imaged beautiful nebulae and researched how stellar winds play a role in star formation, but its most famous finding was that there is liquid water on the moon’s surface.

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA).
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). NASA/Jim Ross

However, despite these achievements, the overall performance of SOFIA has been disappointing. The Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020, the biggest overview of astronomy goals for the next decade, said there were “concerns about SOFIA, given its high cost and modest scientific productivity.”

NASA was spending $86 million per year on SOFIA, which is in a similar range to the budgets for NASA’s contributions to major telescopes like Hubble and Chandra. Compared to the huge amount of scientific data and research papers produced by these two telescopes, the contributions made by SOFIA were nowhere close.

It seems that some of the problems with SOFIA’s output are related to its unique position as an observatory on a plane. One big problem pointed to by the report is that major observatories require large teams of people to run, both to maintain the hardware and to collect the data. It’s trickier to coordinate getting this large staff onto a plane than it would be to have them coming and going from a ground-based facility.

Another problem is that the plane itself requires regular maintenance, so the observatory has to be frequently grounded to allow for this. This means that there was a lot of time in which SOFIA was not collecting science data. “Only a few percent of total yearly calendar hours are turned into peer-reviewed science, an order of magnitude less than other astronomical observatories,” the survey says.

SOFIA won’t fly after the end of September this year, but all the data it has collected will continue to be publicly available for researchers to access.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Astronomers share early images from James Webb’s galaxy survey
Images of four example galaxies selected from the first epoch of COSMOS-Web NIRCam observations, highlighting the range of structures that can be seen. In the upper left is a barred spiral galaxy; in the upper right is an example of a gravitational lens, where the mass of the central galaxy is causing the light from a distant galaxy to be stretched into arcs; on the lower left is nearby galaxy displaying shells of material, suggesting it merged with another galaxy in its past; on the lower right is a barred spiral galaxy with several clumps of active star formation.

One of the major aims of the James Webb Space Telescope is to observe some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, and to do that it needs to be able to see extremely distant objects. But looking at a particular very old galaxy in detail is only half of the problem. To truly understand the earliest stages of the universe, astronomers also need to see how these very old galaxies are distributed so they can understand the large-scale structure of the universe.

That's the aim of the COSMOS-Web program, which is using James Webb to survey a wide area of the sky and look for these rare, ancient galaxies. It aims to study up to 1 million galaxies during over 255 hours of observing time, using both Webb's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and its mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) camera. While there is still plenty of observing left to do, the researchers in the COSMOS-Web program recently shared some of their first results.

Read more
Water was present in our solar system before the sun formed
This artist’s impression shows the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. In the outermost part of the disc water is frozen out as ice and therefore can’t be easily detected. An outburst of energy from the star heats the inner disc to a temperature where water is gaseous, enabling astronomers to detect it. The inset image shows the two kinds of water molecules studied in this disc: normal water, with one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, and a heavier version where one hydrogen atom is replaced with deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen.

You might assume that there has always been water on Earth -- that water was there from the very beginning when our planet formed. But scientists increasingly think that water on Earth may have originated elsewhere, and been carried here by comets. However, the water in the comets had to come from somewhere, and astronomers recently made a discovery which could shed light on how that water was found in the solar system.

The researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope array in Chile, to study a planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis, looking for water there to see how it would be transported as the disk evolves into planets.

Read more
Hubble captures a messy irregular galaxy which hosted a supernova
The irregular spiral galaxy NGC 5486 hangs against a background of dim, distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The tenuous disk of the galaxy is threaded through with pink wisps of star formation, which stand out from the diffuse glow of the galaxy’s bright core.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a dramatic spiral galaxy called NGC 5486, which is shot through with wisps of pink showing regions where new stars are being born.

Located 110 million light-years away in the famous constellation of Ursa Major, this galaxy is a type called an irregular spiral galaxy because its arms are wandering and indistinct. If you compare the image of this galaxy to one of a quintessential spiral galaxy like NGC 2336, you'll see that a non-irregular spiral galaxy has clearly defined arms that reach out from its center and are symmetrical.

Read more