For the first time in history, the specially modified Boeing 747SP from NASA (United States Space Agency) is in South America.
The aircraft, which had been transferred in September of last year from the United States to Germany for a maintenance process that lasted four months, arrived at Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez airport, in Santiago, Chile, on March 18, and began flights on Sunday night (20).
The Jumbo, which carries the Sofia (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) inside its fuselage, will make eight flights until March 29.
The project is a partnership between NASA and the German Aerospace Center. The plane was provided by the Americans and is based in California. The Germans ceded the telescope and are responsible for maintaining the plane and the special systems installed.
Flying above the densest and most polluted part of the atmosphere, the Boeing allows the laboratory and telescope installed inside it to capture infrared signals coming from distant regions of the universe, which are not possible to obtain from the ground.
For the first time in South America, the aircraft will pass by to observe celestial objects that can only be seen from the latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere.
Sofia will mainly observe the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are the two closest neighboring galaxies to our Milky Way. Both are gravitationally bound to the Milky Way and will eventually merge with our galaxy in several billion years.
“Scientific collaboration, particularly in astronomy, has been the cornerstone of the US-Chile relationship, which dates back to the establishment of the Cerro Santa Lucia Observatory in Santiago more than 170 years ago,” said Richard Glenn, the embassy’s affairs officer. of the USA in Chile.
“The deployment of NASA’s Sofia in Chile is the next exciting milestone in this relationship, bringing us closer than ever to the stars.”
For these and other objects to be captured, on each flight the Boeing 747SP will make different trajectories, specifically designed to allow the telescope to be pointed at the researchers’ points of interest.
Like other past deployments in the Southern Hemisphere — it has been, for example, in French Polynesia — Sofia is temporarily moving its base of operations from Palmdale, Calif., to Santiago.
The Sofia team is using a single instrument, the Far Infrared Field Imaging Line Spectrometer, or FIFI-LS, and will observe several critical celestial targets in the Southern Hemisphere.
“We are excited to deploy in Chile so that we can provide more access to the skies of the Southern Hemisphere for our scientific community,” said Naseem Rangwala, Sofia Project Scientist.
“We are increasing our pace of deployment with a focus on efficiency and prioritized goals, and we are grateful for the opportunity to do so in Santiago.”
A video tour of the interior of NASA’s Boeing 747SP shows the interior of the Jumbo specially modified to be a flying space research laboratory. The installed research laboratory has a mission control room, with computers and instruments, in addition to the telescope that makes Sofia the advanced Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.
Because the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, is so close to our galaxy, Sofia can observe it in great detail, on relatively small astronomical scales, to help scientists better understand how stars formed in the early universe.
In addition to observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud, Sofia will look at supernova remnants (when stars explode at the end of their lives) to investigate how they may have contributed to the abundance of dust in the early universe.
Sofia will also attempt its first observation to measure the primordial abundance of lithium by examining the halo of our galaxy, where clouds of neutral hydrogen can be found. These clouds were relatively undisturbed and therefore directly probe the properties of the primitive gas that existed in the early universe.
