Facility
SOFIA is based on a Boeing 747SP wide-body aircraft that has been modified to include a large door in the aft fuselage that can be opened in flight to allow a 2.5 meter diameter reflecting telescope access to the sky. This telescope is designed for infrared astronomy observations in the stratosphere at altitudes of about 41,000 feet (about 12 km). SOFIA's flight capability allows it to rise above almost all of the water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere, which blocks some infrared wavelengths from reaching the ground. At the aircraft's cruising altitude, 85% of the full infrared range will be available. The aircraft can also travel to almost any point on the Earth's surface, allowing observation from the northern and southern hemispheres.
Once ready for use, the expectation is for observing flights to be flown 3 or 4 nights a week for the next 20 years. SOFIA is now based at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility at LA/Palmdale Regional Airport, California, while staff at NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, California, operate the SOFIA Science Center where astronomical observation missions are planned for the flying observatory.
Read more about this topic: Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy
Famous quotes containing the word facility:
“The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,—1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and, 3. Hope to all.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Virtue rejects facility to be her companion.... She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir’d by Conversation.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)