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The SOFIA telescope from within the interior of a Boeing 747 aircraft. The bearing sphere (not vi

Three UCLA professors are leading the way to the development of a new space observatory that will fly around the country in the belly of a modified Boeing 747 airplane.

As an observatory dedicated to investigating infrared light – light that is redder, or has longer wavelengths, than light which can be seen with the human eye – the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy will observe objects such as newborn stars and distant galaxies that are not hot enough to emit visible light.

The project will provide information about how stars and planets form and will increase scientist’s knowledge about the moons and planets in the solar system, as well as the stars and galaxies at the edges of the known universe.

Scheduled to begin observations late in 2006, SOFIA will be operated out of the NASA-Ames Research Center, based near San Francisco Bay.

“A lot of people forget that (NASA) is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; it’s not all to do with flying in space,” said Ian McLean, professor of physics and astronomy and director of the Infrared Astrophysics Lab at UCLA.

McLean, a co-investigator for SOFIA, is also a principal investigator for one of the infrared cameras that will operate on board the plane.

Another physics and astronomy professor, Eric Becklin, is chief scientist and director designate for the SOFIA Science Center, making UCLA the hub of the consortium of American and German institutions collaborating on SOFIA, McLean said.

SOFIA will fly its telescope up to 45,000 feet, above atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, which block infrared radiation from reaching ground-based telescopes.

“That part of the spectrum is badly absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere,” McLean said. “That’s why we have to fly above it,” McLean said. McLean explains that there is a lot that scientists can do on a flying observatory that would be too difficult, if not impossible to do, from the ground or in space.

“(SOFIA) really opens up a new opportunity for infrared astronomy, for two reasons: it’s a large facility, and it’s mobile,” McLean said.

Its mobility will allow SOFIA to travel across the western United States to capture images which can only be seen from certain locations, according to McLean.

The relative ease of transporting the instruments and the telescope by airplane instead of packaging them into a rocket to launch them into space allows scientists to install a bigger telescope into the airborne observatory, McLean said.

“This telescope is even bigger than the Hubble, and more cost-effective than you could ever send into space,” McLean said, adding that SOFIA’s proposed 25-year mission is much longer than most missions, which are only a few years long.

The 2.5-meter-wide telescope on board the airplane is more than twice as wide as SOFIA’s space-borne counterpart, the Spitzer telescope, allowing it to produce images 10 times more detailed than Spitzer’s images.

Mark Morris, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, explains that the greater detail in the images will not only allow scientists to see more objects but will also allow them to observe how a single object moves and changes.

The fact that live people will be present during the mission will also allow scientists to have more direct control over what the telescope is observing than they would if the telescope were launched into space, Morris said.

“The strength of SOFIA is that there are people on board,” said Morris, who also leads the UCLA Data Cycle System Team in designing the data archiving system for system future users of the telescope.

“If the camera goes wrong, there’s someone there to fix it; if there’s something exciting to see, there’s someone to point the camera ... There’s no reaction time possible on a space(-borne) camera,” he added.

McLean said that unlike space-borne observatories, whose technology is out of date by the time the instruments are launched into space, SOFIA’s technology can be state-of-the-art, since it will return to Earth after each mission, which can be up to 9 hours long.

“(With SOFIA,) you can take a chance, put in absolutely state-of-the-art technology, even right on the edge, (and) try things out. That’s a huge attraction,” McLean said.

McLean and his team at UCLA are putting the finishing touches on FLITECAM, one of several cameras that will detect infrared radiation of wavelengths ranging from a few millionths of a meter – slightly longer than the wavelengths of light we can see – to those a thousand times longer, nearly as long as radio waves.

“It’s one of the simpler instruments on board, one of few that will simply take pictures and produce a result that’s immediately apparent,” McLean said.

Scientists hope to use SOFIA to study star births by locating and observing the patches of interstellar dust and gas that are beginning to collapse under their own gravity in the process of forming new stars.

“We’d like to find that moment, where these big clouds of hydrogen gas just begin to collapse,” McLean said. “To do that, we’ve got to look far into the infrared – when it’s a little hotter than the cold interstellar medium around it, but it hasn’t begun to glow.”

Other cameras will observe the infrared light coming from distant stars and galaxies, whose visible light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe so that it can only be detected as infrared light.

Besides its scientific goals, SOFIA is also intended to be used as an educational tool, Morris said. Seats in the top deck of the 747 will allow educators and non-professional astronomers to experience a flight mission themselves, while the data collected from the observations will be made available to the entire astronomy community.

“We hope that our camera will help promote some of that (community) outreach by taking pictures of galaxies, star formations,” McLean said.

Morris is currently designing a program of demonstration science, he said, “to demonstrate to the world how fabulous this observatory can be.”