Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Ambitious Survey Spots Stellar Nurseries

VISTA Magellanic Cloud Survey view of the Tarantula Nebula. Credit: ESO/M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

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ESO’s VISTA telescope has begun a new survey of the Magellanic Cloud, and this spectacular image of the Tarantula Nebula is a taste of great things to come from this near-infrared scan of the more interesting galaxies in our neighborhood. This panoramic near-infrared view captures the nebula itself in great detail as well as the rich surrounding area of sky. “This view is of one of the most important regions of star formation in the local Universe — the spectacular 30 Doradus star-forming region, also called the Tarantula Nebula,” said the leader of the survey team, Maria-Rosa Cioni from the University of Hertfordshire. “At its core is a large cluster of stars called RMC 136, in which some of the most massive stars known are located.”

VISTA is a new survey telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, and is equipped with a huge camera that detects light in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, revealing a wealth of detail about astronomical objects that gives us insight into the inner workings of astronomical phenomena. Near-infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light, fortunately, it can pass through much of the dust that would normally obscure the views that our eyes can see. This makes it particularly useful for studying objects such as young stars that are still enshrouded in the gas and dust clouds from which they formed. Another powerful aspect of VISTA is the large area of the sky that its camera can capture in each shot.
The VISTA Magellanic Cloud Survey is one of six huge near-infrared surveys of the southern sky that will take up most of the first five years of operations of VISTA.

This project will scan a vast area — 184 square degrees of the sky (corresponding to almost one thousand times the apparent area of the full Moon) including our neighboring galaxies the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The end result will be a detailed study of the star formation history and three-dimensional geometry of the Magellanic system.

“The VISTA images will allow us to extend our studies beyond the inner regions of the Tarantula into the multitude of smaller stellar nurseries nearby, which also harbor a rich population of young and massive stars,” said Chris Evans who is part of the VMC team. “Armed with the new, exquisite infrared images, we will be able to probe the cocoons in which massive stars are still forming today, while also looking at their interaction with older stars in the wider region.”

The wide-field image shows a host of different objects. The bright area above the centre is the Tarantula Nebula itself, with the RMC 136 cluster of massive stars in its core. To the left is the NGC 2100 star cluster. To the right is the tiny remnant of the supernova SN1987A (eso1032). Below the centre are a series of star-forming regions including NGC 2080 — nicknamed the “Ghost Head Nebula” — and the NGC 2083 star cluster.

See more images, zoomable images, and movies of the Tarantula Nebula at the ESO website.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

WISE Cryostat is Depleting

An image released in August 2010 from WISE image of the Small Magellanic Cloud. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

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NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is losing its cool. The spacecraft is running out of the frozen coolant needed to keep its heat-sensitive instrument chilled, and will only be in operation for 2-3 more months. While the spacecraft was designed to be rather short-lived – 7 to 10 months — it still is sad to see the mission winding down. But WISE has completed its primary mission, a full scan of the entire sky in infrared light, which was accomplished by July 17, 2010. The mission has taken more than 1.5 million snapshots so far, uncovering hundreds of millions of objects, including asteroids, stars and galaxies. It has discovered more than 29,000 new asteroids to date, more than 100 near-Earth objects and 15 comets.

The telescope has two coolant tanks that keep the spacecraft’s normal operating temperature at 12 Kelvin (minus 438 degrees Fahrenheit). The outer, secondary tank is now depleted, causing the temperature to increase. One of WISE’s infrared detectors, the longest-wavelength band most sensitive to heat, stopped producing useful data once the telescope warmed to 31 Kelvin (minus 404 degrees Fahrenheit). The primary tank still has a healthy supply of coolant, and data quality from the remaining infrared detectors remains high.

WISE is continuing a second survey of about one-half the sky as originally planned. It’s possible the remaining coolant will run out before that scan is finished. Scientists say the second scan will help identify new and nearby objects, as well as those that have changed in brightness. It could also help to confirm oddball objects picked up in the first scan.

NASA is hoping to find more Near Earth Objects with WISE’s remaining days of operations.
“WISE’s prime mission was to do an infrared background map,” said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near-Earth Objects Observation program at NASA, speaking at a workshop this week to define objectives for exploring asteroids. “But we realized in talking with scientists that it would also make a good asteroid detector by comparing images. It has done a good job of finding a lot of objects for us.”

Source: NASA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

WISE Covers the Heart and Soul of Infrared Astronomy

The Heart and Soul nebulae are seen in this infrared mosaic from WISE. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

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In about six months’ time, NASA’s WISE mission, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, has captured almost a million images, covering about three-quarters, or 30,000 square degrees, of the sky. At the 216th American Astronomical Society meeting today, astronomers released a new mosaic of two bubbling clouds in space, known as the Heart and Soul nebulae.

“This image actually has two hearts; one is a Valentine’s Day heart, and the other is a surgical heart that you have in your body,” said Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles who presented the new picture. “This new image demonstrates the power of WISE to capture vast regions. We’re looking north, south, east and west to map the whole sky.”

To make this huge mosaic WISE stared at this region of space which lies about 6,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, for 3.5 hours of total exposure time, taking 1,147 images.

Both these nebulae are massive star-making factories, marked by giant bubbles blown into surrounding dust by radiation and winds from the stars. The infrared vision of WISE allows it to see into the cooler and dustier crevices of clouds like these, where gas and dust are just beginning to collect into new stars.

WISE will complete its first map of the sky in July 2010, and then spend the next three months surveying much of the sky a second time, before the solid-hydrogen coolant needed to chill its infrared detectors runs dry. Wright said the first installment of the public WISE catalog will be released in summer 2011.
Wright marveled at how in the span of his career he has gone from observing in just 4 pixels to now observing with WISE in almost 4 million pixels.

“It’s been an amazing progress in IR astronomy, with cameras growing by a factor of a million in power in just a few decades,” he said.

Screen shot from Wright's presentation at the AAS meeting showing how much of the sky WISE has covered. The small green box shows the area of the Heart and Soul nebulae.

Spotting NEO’s

One goal of the WISE mission is to study asteroids throughout our solar system and to find out more about how they vary in size and composition. Infrared helps with this task because it can get better size measurements of the space rocks than visible light.

So far, WISE has observed more than 60,000 asteroids, most of which lie in the main belt, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. About 11,000 of these objects are newly discovered, and about 50 of them belong to a class of near-Earth objects, which have paths that take them within about 48 million kilometers (30 million miles) of Earth’s orbit.

“As WISE is orbiting the Earth, we are sweeping through the solar system like radar, and building up a map of what the solar system looks like in near infrared, looking for Near Earth Objects,” said astronomer Tommy Grav of Johns Hopkins University.

Grav told Universe Today so far there haven’t been any big surprises in the amount of NEOs the WISE team is finding. “We haven’t done full analysis of all the data WISE has sent back, but we’re finding about what we expected. We’re right in the ballpark of what we expected to find.”

The mission also studies the Trojans, asteroids that run along with Jupiter in its orbit around the sun in two packs — one in front of and one behind the gas giant. It has seen more than 800 of these objects, and by the end of the mission, should have observed about half of all 4,500 known Trojans. The results will address dueling theories about how the outer planets evolved.

“We can basically confirm and fill in the gap between ground based observations and the Spitzer Space Telescope’s observations of the Trojan asteroids,” Grav said.

Grav said WISE is an outstanding observatory. “We’ve basically done in six months what it took over 100 years to do in the optical.”

Sources: NASA, AAS press conference

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

WISE Pictures the Tadpole Nebula with a String of Pearls

This image from WISE shows the Tadpole nebula. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

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The Tadpole nebula is looking very stylish in this new infrared image from the WISE spacecraft, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. An asteroid appears like a string of pearls — seen as a line of yellow-green dots in the boxes near center — in this stitched together mosaic. The Tadpole is a star-forming region in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, it happened to catch asteroid 1719 Jens in action, moving across WISE’s field of view. A second asteroid was also observed cruising by, as highlighted in the boxes near the upper left (the larger boxes are blown-up versions of the smaller ones).

More on this image below, but the WISE team received a bit of bad news this week.

WISE principal investigator Ned Wright and his team had proposed a three-month “warm” extension of the mission after the supply of hydrogen that cools the telescope and detectors on board runs out. However, according to an article in Space News, NASA’s 2010 Astrophysics Senior Review Committee recommended that the mission not be extended, and end as originally planned in October of this year.

While WISE is expected to produce significant results, the committee said there was not adequate scientific justification to continue the mission.

The proposed additional three months, known as Warm WISE – where the spacecraft would observe in two of the four infrared wavelengths it has available when WISE is cooled –would have added $6.5 million to the program’s $320 million price tag.

Currently, WISE produces approximately 7,500 images a day.

And this latest image is a “gem.”

It consists of twenty-five frames, taken at all four of the wavelengths and were combined into one image: infrared light of 3.4 microns is color-coded blue: 4.6-micron light is cyan; 12-micron-light is green; and 22-micron light is red.

But wait, there’s more! Also visible in the image are two satellites orbiting above WISE (highlighted in the ovals). They streak through the image, appearing as faint green trails. The apparent motion of asteroids is slower than satellites because asteroids are much more distant, and thus appear as dots that move from one WISE frame to the next, rather than streaks in a single frame.

This Tadpole region is chock full of stars as young as only a million years old — infants in stellar terms — and masses over 10 times that of our sun. It is called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot, young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and Sim 130. These “tadpoles” appear as the yellow squiggles near the center of the frame. The knotted regions at their heads are likely to contain new young stars. WISE’s infrared vision is helping to ferret out hidden stars such as these.

WISE is an all-sky survey, snapping pictures of the whole sky, including everything from asteroids to stars to powerful, distant galaxies.

Sources: JPL, Space News

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Herschel Spots Previously Unseen Stars in Rosette Nebula

Infrared image of the Rosette molecular cloud by the Herschel space observatory. Credits: ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium/HOBYS Key Programme Consortia

Wow, what a gorgeous new image from the Herschel telescope – and what makes this especially stunning is that we’ve never seen these stars before! And these stars in the Rosette Nebula are huge, as each one is up to ten times the mass of our Sun. “High-mass star-forming regions are rare and further away than low-mass ones,” said Frédérique Motte, from the Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, France. “So astronomers have had to wait for a space telescope like Herschel to reveal them.”
Continue reading “Herschel Spots Previously Unseen Stars in Rosette Nebula”

Posted on by Jean Tate

Ozone on Mars: Two Windows Better Than One

An illustration showing the ESA's Mars Express mission. Credit: ESA/Medialab)


Understanding the present-day Martian climate gives us insights into its past climate, which in turn provides a science-based context for answering questions about the possibility of life on ancient Mars.

Our understanding of Mars’ climate today is neatly packaged as climate models, which in turn provide powerful consistency checks – and sources of inspiration – for the climate models which describe anthropogenic global warming here on Earth.

But how can we work out what the climate on Mars is, today? A new, coordinated observation campaign to measure ozone in the Martian atmosphere gives us, the interested public, our own window into just how painstaking – yet exciting – the scientific grunt work can be.

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The Martian atmosphere has played a key role in shaping the planet’s history and surface. Observations of the key atmospheric components are essential for the development of accurate models of the Martian climate. These in turn are needed to better understand if climate conditions in the past may have supported liquid water, and for optimizing the design of future surface-based assets at Mars.

Ozone is an important tracer of photochemical processes in the atmosphere of Mars. Its abundance, which can be derived from the molecule’s characteristic absorption spectroscopy features in spectra of the atmosphere, is intricately linked to that of other constituents and it is an important indicator of atmospheric chemistry. To test predictions by current models of photochemical processes and general atmospheric circulation patterns, observations of spatial and temporal ozone variations are required.

The Spectroscopy for Investigation of Characteristics of the Atmosphere of Mars (SPICAM) instrument on Mars Express has been measuring ozone abundances in the Martian atmosphere since 2003, gradually building up a global picture as the spacecraft orbits the planet.

These measurements can be complemented by ground-based observations taken at different times and probing different sites on Mars, thereby extending the spatial and temporal coverage of the SPICAM measurements. To quantitatively link the ground-based observations with those by Mars Express, coordinated campaigns are set up to obtain simultaneous measurements.

Infrared heterodyne spectroscopy, such as that provided by the Heterodyne Instrument for Planetary Wind and Composition (HIPWAC), provides the only direct access to ozone on Mars with ground-based telescopes; the very high spectral resolving power (greater than 1 million) allows Martian ozone spectral features to be resolved when they are Doppler shifted away from ozone lines of terrestrial origin.

A coordinated campaign to measure ozone in the atmosphere of Mars, using SPICAM and HIPWAC, has been ongoing since 2006. The most recent element of this campaign was a series of ground-based observations using HIPWAC on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i. These were obtained between 8 and 11 December 2009 by a team of astronomers led by Kelly Fast from the Planetary Systems Laboratory, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the USA.

Credit: Kelly Fast

About the image: HIPWAC spectrum of Mars’ atmosphere over a location on Martian latitude 40°N; acquired on 11 December 2009 during an observation campaign with the IRTF 3 m telescope in Hawai’i. This unprocessed spectrum displays features of ozone and carbon dioxide from Mars, as well as ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere through which the observation was made. Processing techniques will model and remove the terrestrial contribution from the spectrum and determine the amount of ozone at this northern position on Mars.

The observations had been coordinated in advance with the Mars Express science operations team, to ensure overlap with ozone measurements made in this same period with SPICAM.

The main goal of the December 2009 campaign was to confirm that observations made with SPICAM (which measures the broad ozone absorption spectra feature centered at around 250 nm) and HIPWAC (which detects and measures ozone absorption features at 9.7 μm) retrieve the same total ozone abundances, despite being performed at two different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and having different sensitivities to the ozone profile. A similar campaign in 2008, had largely validated the consistency of the ozone measurement results obtained with SPICAM and the HIPWAC instrument.

The weather conditions and the seeing were very good at the IRTF site during the December 2009 campaign, which allowed for good quality spectra to be obtained with the HIPWAC instrument.

Kelly and her colleagues gathered ozone measurements for a number of locations on Mars, both in the planet’s northern and southern hemisphere. During this four-day campaign the SPICAM observations were limited to the northern hemisphere. Several HIPWAC measurements were simultaneous with observations by SPICAM allowing a direct comparison. Other HIPWAC measurements were made close in time to SPICAM orbital passes that occurred outside of the ground-based telescope observations and will also be used for comparison.

The team also performed measurements of the ozone abundance over the Syrtis Major region, which will help to constrain photochemical models in this region.
Analysis of the data from this recent campaign is ongoing, with another follow-up campaign of coordinated HIPWAC and SPICAM observations already scheduled for March this year.

Putting the compatibility of the data from these two instruments on a firm base will support combining the ground-based infrared measurements with the SPICAM ultraviolet measurements in testing the photochemical models of the Martian atmosphere. The extended coverage obtained by combining these datasets helps to more accurately test predictions by atmospheric models.

It will also quantitatively link the SPICAM observations to longer-term measurements made with the HIPWAC instrument and its predecessor IRHS (the Infrared Heterodyne Spectrometer) that go back to 1988. This will support the study of the long-term behavior of ozone and associated chemistry in the atmosphere of Mars on a timescale longer than the current missions to Mars.

Sources: ESA, a paper published in the 15 September 2009 issue of Icarus

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Astronomical Eye Candy from WISE First Images

The immense Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31 or simply M31, is captured in full in this February 2010 image from WISE. credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

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The WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission isn’t wasting any time in making observations and releasing images. Already the new infrared observatory has spied its first comet and first near Earth asteroid, and today released a “sweet” collection of eye candy from across the universe. “We’ve got a candy store of images coming down from space,” said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator for WISE. “Everyone has their favorite flavors, and we’ve got them all.”

Four new, processed pictures illustrate a sampling of the mission’s targets — a bursting star-forming cloud, a faraway cluster of hundreds of galaxies, a wispy comet, and above, the grand Andromeda galaxy as we’ve never seen it before, with new details of its ringed arms of stars .

NGC 3603, as seen by WISE. credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Another image shows a bright and choppy star-forming region called NGC 3603, lying 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. This star-forming factory is churning out batches of new stars, some of which are monstrously massive and hotter than the sun. The hot stars warm the surrounding dust clouds, causing them to glow at infrared wavelengths.

Siding Spring Comet via WISE. credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

This image shows the beauty of a comet called Siding Spring. As the comet parades toward the sun, it sheds dust that glows in infrared light visible to WISE. The comet’s tail, which stretches about 10 million miles, looks like a streak of red paint. A bright star appears below it in blue. WISE is expected to find perhaps dozens of comets, and bagged its first one on January 22, 2010. WISE will help unravel clues locked inside comets about how our solar system came to be.

WISE's view of the Fornax Cluster. credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The fourth WISE picture is of the Fornax cluster, a region of hundreds of galaxies all bound together into one family. These galaxies are 60 million light-years from Earth. The mission’s infrared views reveal both stagnant and active galaxies, providing a census of data on an entire galactic community.

“All these pictures tell a story about our dusty origins and destiny,” said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “WISE sees dusty comets and rocky asteroids tracing the formation and evolution of our solar system. We can map thousands of forming and dying solar systems across our entire galaxy. We can see patterns of star formation across other galaxies, and waves of star-bursting galaxies in clusters millions of light years away.”

Since WISE began its scan of the entire sky in infrared light on Jan. 14, the space telescope has beamed back more than a quarter of a million raw, infrared images. The mission will scan the sky one-and-a-half times by October. At that point, the frozen coolant needed to chill its instruments will be depleted. However, the team predicts the spacecraft will be still be operational for 3 additional months following the 10 month prime mission.

So, stay tuned for more images from WISE!

Source: NASA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

New VISTA of Orion

Orion from the VISTA infrared telescope. Credit: ESO

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Oh-oh-oh Orion! The new VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) infrared survey telescope has used its huge field of view to show the full splendor of the Orion Nebula. With its infrared eyes, it has peered deeply into dusty regions that are normally hidden to expose the curious behavior of the very active young stars buried there.

VISTA is the latest addition to ESO’s Paranal Observatory. It is the largest survey telescope in the world and is dedicated to mapping the sky at infrared wavelengths. The large (4.1-metre) mirror, wide field of view and very sensitive detectors make VISTA a unique instrument. This dramatic new image of the Orion Nebula illustrates VISTA’s remarkable powers.

The Orion Nebula is about 1,350 light-years from Earth. Although spectacular when seen through an ordinary telescope, what can be seen using visible light is only a small part of a cloud of gas in which stars are forming. Most of the action is deeply embedded in dust clouds and to see what is really happening astronomers need to use telescopes with detectors sensitive to the longer wavelength radiation that can penetrate the dust. VISTA has imaged the Orion Nebula at wavelengths about twice as long as can be detected by the human eye.

Four highlights of the new VISTA image of Orion. Credit: ESO

On the upper-left, the central region of VISTA’s view of the Orion Nebula is shown, centered on the four dazzling stars of the Trapezium. A rich cluster of young stars can be seen here that is invisible in normal, visible light images. In the lower-right panel the part of the nebula to the north of the center is shown. Here there are many young stars embedded in the dust clouds that are only apparent because their infrared glow can penetrate the dust and be detected by the VISTA camera. Many outflows, jets and other interactions from young stars are apparent, seen in the infrared glow from molecular hydrogen and showing up as red blobs. On the upper-right, a region to the west of center is shown. Here the fierce ultraviolet light from the Trapezium is sculpting the gas clouds into curious wavy shapes. A distant edge-on spiral galaxy is also seen shining right through the nebula. At the lower-left a region south of the center is shown. Each extract covers a region of sky about nine arcminutes across.

All these features are of great interest to astronomers studying the birth and youth of stars.

Source: ESO

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

New Technique to Find Earth-like Exoplanets

The Artists impression of HD 189733b, graph and image of the telescope Credit: NASA

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Another technique has been added to the exo-planet hunters’ toolkit, and it doesn’t require huge ground-based telescopes or space-based observatories. A group of astronomers developed the new technique by using a relatively small Earth-based infrared telescope to identify an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet nearly 63 light-years away. This new ground-based technique will enable the study of atmospheres of planets outside our Solar System, accelerating our search for Earth-like planets with life-related molecules.

On Aug. 11, 2007, Mark Swain from JPL and his team turned the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility – a 3-meter telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, — to the hot, Jupiter-size planet HD 189733b in the constellation Vulpecula. Every 2.2 days, the planet orbits a K-type main sequence star slightly cooler and smaller than our Sun. HD189733b had already yielded breakthrough advances in exoplanet science, including detections of water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide using space telescopes.

Using a novel calibration method to remove systematic observation errors caused by instability of Earth’s atmosphere, they obtained a measurement revealing details of the HD189733b’s atmospheric composition and conditions, an unprecedented achievement from an Earth-based observatory.

They detected carbon dioxide and methane in the exo-planet’s atmosphere of HD 189733b with the SpeX spectrograph, which splits light into its components to reveal the distinctive spectral signatures of different chemicals. Their key work was development of the novel calibration method to remove systematic observation errors caused by the variability of Earth’s atmosphere and instability due to the movement of the telescope system as it tracks its target.

his scheme explains how the spectrum of the planet is isolated. First the spectrum of both, the planet and ist central star is registered; then, when the planet is hidden beyond the star, one obtains the spectrum of the star alone. If one subtracts the second from the first, one obtains the spectrum of the planet alone.

It took the researchers more than two years to develop their method so that it could be applied to spectroscopic observations with the 3 meter telescope, enabling the identification of specific molecules such as methane and carbon dioxide.

“As a consequence of this work, we now have the exciting prospect that other suitably equipped yet relatively small ground-based telescopes should be capable of characterizing exoplanets,” said John Rayner, the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility support scientist who built the SpeX spectrograph. “On some days we can’t even see the Sun with the telescope, and the fact that on other days we can now obtain a spectrum of an exoplanet 63 light-years away is astonishing.”

During their observations, the team found unexpected bright infrared emission from methane that stands out on the day side of HD198733b. This could indicate some kind of activity in the planet’s atmosphere which could be related to the effect of ultraviolet radiation from the planet’s parent star hitting the planet’s upper atmosphere, but more detailed study is needed.

“An immediate goal for using this technique is to more fully characterize the atmosphere of this and other exoplanets, including detection of organic and possibly prebiotic molecules” like those that preceded the evolution of life on Earth, said Swain. “We’re ready to undertake that task.” Some early targets will be the super-Earths. Used in synergy with observations from NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer and the future James Webb Space Telescope, the new technique “will give us an absolutely brilliant way to characterize super-Earths,” Swain said.

Their work is reported today in the Feb. 3, 2010 edition of Nature.

For a great FAQ about using spectrum to study exoplanets, see this page by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

Sources: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, STFC

Posted on by Nicholos Wethington

Airborne Observatory Passes Next Stage of Testing

SOFIA, accompanied by an F/A-18 during the open-door testing in December of 2009. Image Credit: NASA/Jim Ross

If you’ve ever been out observing and the clouds roll in, undoubtedly you’ve thought, “If I could only get above all of these stupid clouds, the sky would look great!” Well, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is capable of doing just that: SOFIA is an infrared telescope mounted on a 747SP airliner that used to be a passenger plane for Pan Am. By mounting the telescope on an airplane, NASA is able to fly it into the stratosphere, and get past all of the annoying gases and water vapor that get in the way when making observations.

SOFIA is still undergoing a battery of testing to ensure proper operation of the telescope before it starts observations. In December of last year, the telescope was taken up and the doors to the bay where it is mounted were opened. On January 15th, the telescope was flown to 35,000 feet (10.6 km) and the doors were left closed to test an updated gyroscope that was installed on the ‘scope.

These latest tests were designed to test how well the telescope can stabilize itself, because an airplane flying at 41,000 feet (12.5km) – the altitude at which many observations will be made – isn’t exactly a steady mount for a telescope. Gyroscopic stabilizers counteract the movement of the airplane to steady the telescope for observation.

During the test, the ability of the entire system to operate at cooler temperatures was established as well. The temperature for this latest test hovered around -15 degrees Celsius (+5 degrees Fahrenheit) even with the doors closed.

The telescope itself has a 2.5 meter (8.2 foot) mirror, with a 0.4 meter (1.3 foot) secondary mirror. The range of wavelengths that SOFIA can “see” is 0.3 microns to 1.6mm, meaning it’s capable of taking images in the infrared and submillimeter.

Some of the objects and phenomena that SOFIA will be observing include proto-planetary disks and planet formation, star formation, the chemical composition of other galaxies and interstellar cloud physics. An extensive description of SOFIA’s capabilities can be found on their site here.

SOFIA still has a few tests to undergo, and will be fully operational come 2014. In the next few years basic science observations will start up, and then other instruments will be added to the observatory. SOFIA is a collaboration between NASA and a German telescope partner, Deutsches SOFIA Institute.

Source: NASA press release