Sometimes when they have really cool stuff to share,
NASA invites social media users out to NASA social events
to talk about cool science stuff.
And back in April I got to go to one of these events
to see the Sofia Observatory.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And if you're wondering what the Sofia Observatory is,
I have to admit, when I first saw
the email I was wondering the exact same thing.
But when I read that it was a modified
747 with a telescope mounted inside, that
flies around looking at cool space stuff, I was in.
I drove to NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center,
and the day started off with some background information
on Sofia.
Sofia stands for the Stratospheric Observatory
for Infrared Astronomy.
It's a partnership between NASA and the German Aerospace
Center.
And the idea is that Sofia is looking for infrared light.
Infrared light can give us additional information
about distant objects.
For example, here's a picture they showed us
of Orion's Belt in the visible spectrum,
and here's a picture of it taken in infrared.
Now, this picture was taken by the Infrared Astronomical
Satellite, not Sofia.
But what you can see is that there
are lots of additional structures
that appear in infrared.
These big, bright patches are big, dusty space clouds
that we weren't able to see in the visible spectrum.
But taking infrared pictures from Earth
is hard, because the water vapor in our atmosphere
actually filters out a lot of that infrared light
before it can reach ground-based telescopes.
So to solve this problem scientists have strapped
a telescope onto a plane, so that they
can fly above the water vapor.
OK, so it's not actually strapped to the plane,
it's mounted inside the plane, but it's still really cool.
The telescope is mounted inside a specially modified 747.
It actually used to be a Pan Am passenger plane, which
I think is super cool.
But now it's been retrofitted to hold lots of science instead.
The 2.7 meter telescope is housed
inside a special compartment in the back of the plane.
It has a door that opens to the outside,
and the fuselage is shaped so that the air travels
up and over the top of the compartment,
rather than inside where it could jostle the equipment.
It was even labeled on one diagram as laminar flow.
Now, we didn't actually get to see the telescope
because it's a very sensitive piece of equipment.
You don't really want to just open the door out on the tarmac
and have a bunch of dust fly in.
But we did get to go into the cabin, where
the scientists sit.
This is separated by a wall because the cabin side
stays pressurized, while the telescope side does not
when the outside door opens.
But on the cabin side scientists can change out
the instrument hooked up to the telescope
in order to observe different things.
This part here, that's held together
by this beam, that's the instrument.
The telescope is everything else in blue.
And that's owned and operated by the Germans.
So that's an absolute engineering marvel.
The one hooked up the day we visited, preparing for a flight
that night, was EXES--
used to study protoplanetary disks and planetary
atmospheres.
Now, think back to the last time that you were on an airplane.
There might have been a little bit of turbulence.
And even if there wasn't, it's not the perfectly smooth flight
you would need to be able to point a telescope at something
and take precise observations.
So the telescope in Sofia is supported by gyroscopes, shock
absorbers, and big bearings.
So that it can stay locked on its target
while the plane moves around a bit.
This thing's able to observe into,
up to moderate turbulence, and lock on to a target
to almost a half arcsecond.
So it's able to do this while we're flying 500 miles an hour.
We're able to look outside the airplane,
only on the left side of the airplane.
And only almost vertical and almost horizontal.
It's only able to move plus or minus three degrees this way.
So when we're flying, the pilots have
to be very precise getting the airplane aligned
with the target.
So anywhere we're going, if the target's over here,
the pilots have to turn around and take a look at that target.
They're all various space targets.
Stars, planets, moons of planets,
and those kinds of things.
Sofia was actually in the news pretty recently,
because observations from it helped
to find evidence of helium hydride, the suspected
first molecule in the universe, out in space.
Now, while we were there we got to see some other really cool
science planes, like the DC-8 and some ER-2s that
were being rebuilt. But my favorite of the day
was the Super Guppy.
This plane does not look like it should be able to fly.
The Super Guppy is built to transport really big things.
One of its next tasks is going to be to transport the Orion
crew and service modules that will one day take astronauts
to deep space.
Super cool.
I feel like it's hard to deny just how
awesome this plane looks.
A huge thank you to NASA and the NASA social team
for letting me take a look at some really cool airplanes,
and a big thank you to my Patreon patrons for supporting
this kind of content.
This was a slightly different kind of video for this channel.
But really, I just want to take you guys on cool science
adventures.
So I hope that you liked it.
I just want to share cool science with you,
and this was a cool science thing that I got to do.
And as always, remember to go forth and do science.
[MUSIC PLAYING]