It’s extremely loud, so headsets are essential for communication. Inside, the cabin is buzzing with activity. It is one of SOFIA’s last flights by the time you read this the programme will have ended. I’m about to board a very special aircraft: the Boeing 747 SOFIA aeroplane, carrying a 2.5-metre infrared telescope operated by NASA and DLR, Germany’s space agency. The time is 5:30pm on 8 September 2022 and I’m in the mission briefing room at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California. Niamh Shaw takes a trip on one of the final flights of the plane carrying the SOFIA observatory Without proper repair, the mission would be scrapped.SOFIA, a powerful 19-tonne infrared telescope mounted on a specially modified Boeing 747SP, was retired from duty in September 2022 A farewell to airborne astronomy Midway through the afternoon, a rogue blast of absurdly strong wind had hurled a piece of equipment at the plane that ended up leaving a gash near one of the windows. Soon, I’ll have a longer report for you about the flight and the occultation data, perhaps with such interestingness as the magical bone brought aboard for good luck, and maybe a bit about what it’s like to see the southern aurora from the cockpit of a 747.įor now, I’ll leave you with this little piece of information: The whole thing almost didn’t happen. A brief flash of brightness toward the midpoint of Pluto’s passage revealed that SOFIA had hit its target bang on and provided astronomers with a beautifully precise set of data. Then, for about 90 seconds in the early winter morning, we watched as Pluto dimmed the face of that distant star. Yet off we zoomed through the night, zigzagging over the ocean for about six hours as teams calibrated their instruments and got preliminary data on both Pluto and the star. To say mission scientists were worried would be a bit of an understatement. Luckily, teams on board SOFIA were able to work with the revised predictions and recalculate a flight path (not once, but twice!) that would intercept the shadow’s center… IF it ended up falling along the dramatically different new coordinates. Don’t quite hit that center line? You’ll miss some important data.Īs it turned out, the best predictions of the shadow’s track were proven wrong at the last possible hour. Miscalculate the shadow’s track, and you’ll miss it. Fall behind on your flight path, and you’ll miss it. We would be trying to observe the occultation from 39,000 feet up, which eliminated the possibility of problematic clouds crashing the party.īut the shadow’s path is a shifting, elusive target that can be hard to nail down-and it’s sweeping across the Earth’s surface at more than 53,000 miles per hour. Scientists from around the world had gathered at the region’s ground-based observatories and were eagerly training their eyes on the sky. Early predictions had put the center line somewhere between southern Australia and northern Antarctica. The closer we were to the center of the shadow’s path, the better those observations would be. This would be the brightest star Pluto had yet occulted – and given next month’s Pluto flyby, astronomers were particularly keen to gather the most precise observations possible. Called an occultation, the relatively rare celestial alignment lets astronomers use the distant star’s light to probe the structure of Pluto’s atmosphere, which has been behaving a bit oddly since its discovery in 1988. New Zealand time, Pluto would slide in front of a bright star in the constellation Sagittarius and cast a Pluto-size shadow along a swath of Earth. We were riding aboard NASA’s flying infrared telescope, SOFIA, and needed to get that Boeing 747 to the exact right place at the exact right time. Last night, I joined several teams of scientists as they chased Pluto’s shadow across the southern Pacific ocean.
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