A describe of SOFIA making ready for takeoff.
(Picture: © NASA)
NASA wants you to get smitten by the moon — or more particularly, about a mysterious unique science consequence the company plans to unveil on Monday (Oct. 26).
For more famous factors, we will must reduction till a recordsdata conference at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) that day, which you would dawdle trying here at Home.com or today thru the company’s web web teach.
A NASA commentary announcing the guidelines conference guarantees “an fascinating unique discovery in regards to the moon” and references the company’s ambitious Artemis program to land astronauts on the moon’s south pole in 2024. Nonetheless the science itself comes from a lengthy-running observatory, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a German-American partnership that made its first flight in 2007.
Connected: Images from SOFIA, NASA’s flying telescope (gallery)
SOFIA is no popular astronomy facility — it is an astronomy facility packed into a modified 747 jet that carries its instruments up above most of Earth’s ambiance, which on the total distorts floor-primarily primarily based observations. SOFIA’s perch on a jet offers it one of the dear advantages of both floor-primarily primarily based and procedure-primarily primarily based observations: It be somewhat straight forward to enhance, but avoids that atmospheric interference.
And for the reason that observatory flies love a airplane, it is straight forward to settle observations of a specific patch of sky throughout every of the observatory’s 10-hour flights, per NASA. SOFIA’s instruments center of attention on infrared light, finding out objects in our possess describe voltaic system and in diversified galaxies.
Naseem Rangwala, mission scientist for the SOFIA mission at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, can be one among four speakers throughout Monday’s recordsdata conference. She’ll be joined by Paul Hertz, who leads NASA’s astrophysics division; Jacob Bleacher, the executive exploration scientist for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate; and Casey Honniball, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Home Flight Center in Maryland.
Though the science itself is exclusive, probabilities are the observations will not be: SOFIA became grounded in mid-March attributable to the coronavirus pandemic and thoroughly began flying yet again in mid-August, per NASA statements. SOFIA has also struggled within the budgetary task over the final decade, as presidential budget requests possess over and over selected the mission for cancellation; Congress has reinstated it every time.
Talk over with Home.com Monday for total protection of NASA’s unique moon discovery.
Electronic mail Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or apply her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Fb.
Join our Home Boards to preserve talking procedure on essentially the most modern missions, night sky and more! And while you can possess a recordsdata tip, correction or commentary, utter us at: [email protected].
