NASA said it opened the aircraft doors on its giant flying space observatory for the first time in flight recently, with the idea of letting engineers to understand how air flows in and around its 98-inch infrared telescope.
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy or SOFIA is a modified 747 jet that flew for one hour and 19 minutes which included two minutes with the telescope's doors opened 10% of the way. The next test, slated for later in December, will see the door fully opened.
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The test flights, which are designed to verify the scientific capabilities of the telescope systems such as the vibration isolation, the inertial stabilization and the pointing control -- will culminate with the flying observatory's first official flight in the summer of 2010, NASA said.
NASA says SOFIA will ultimately be the world's largest airborne astronomical observatory, offering three times better image quality and vastly increased observational sensitivity than the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a NASA's C-141 with a telescope that flew between 1975 and 1995.
According to NASA SOFIA will be a world-class airborne space observatory that will complement the Hubble, Spitzer, Herschel and James Webb space telescopes in particular as well as other observatories across the globe.
SOFIA features a German-built 100-inch (2.5 meter) diameter far-infrared telescope weighing 20 tons mounted in the rear fuselage of a highly modified Boeing 747SP aircraft. SOFIA is a joint program by NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt).
From NASA's Dryden base, SOFIA missions will be conducted over virtually the entire globe, NASA stated. Missions will be flown at altitudes of 39,000 to 45,000 feet, above 99% of the water vapor in the lower atmosphere that restrict the capabilities of ground-based observatories over most of the infrared and sub-millimeter spectral range, NASA stated.
SOFIA is designed to help answer questions about the creation and evolution of the universe, including how stars and planets are formed, how organic materials necessary for life form and evolve, and the nature of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, NASA stated.