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>> Welcome to the mission brief for Flight 168.
>> We'll taxi into position at Runway 25.
We'll go out and make a right down on the departure towards Daggett VOR.
>> Going to be taking off almost on the hour.
It's 2 minutes prior, and you're going
to be making a right hand turn proceeding to the first
science point.
>> What we're looking at is a galaxy which is known
to have a super massive black hole at its center.
>>What we need to do is to point the telescope
at 45 degrees elevation.
>> If we see this, it'll only be I think the 3rd time a supernova
like this has ever been seen in the mid-infrared.
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>> The doors have been all armed.
Everyone has been trained on how to open them.
As you push the door, make sure you let it go
or you will exit a lot quicker than you wanted to.
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[Radio chatter]
>> I was born in the generation
where the Apollo astronauts started to walk on the moon.
That got me very excited about wanting
to be an astronaut myself.
I think a lot of kids really wanted to be an astronaut
when they were younger.
>> I grew up with the space shuttle program.
One of my dreams as a kid was to become an astronaut.
>> From 6th grade, when I went to space camp for the first time.
I kind of always had this dream of something with NASA.
>> When I was young, I always dreamed
about being an astronaut, getting into space.
It's so exciting that NASA has given me this opportunity
to participate in this program.
>>Now I have an actual chance to fly.
On SOFIA.
>> This is fulfilling that one...one of my lifelong dreams.
>> This gives me my chance
to actually be part of a NASA mission.
>> Now, Pamela, are these nodding
and chopping things normal functions?
>> Yes. Nod, chop, and dither.
Chop is a secondary mirror.
Nod is the primary mirror.
Dither has to do with the light coming
down the bore sight to the instrument.
And they'll move it around so
where there's a bad pixel or channel.
You don't have a hole in your data.
>> We have 2 cameras.
One operates from 5 to 25 microns,
the other from 25 to 40 microns.
And with a dichroic beam splitter, you can image
in both wave lengths at once.
>> I like supernovae in particular because everything
that we're made of, all the atoms that you see around us.
All that was made inside of a star.
The universe would be a boring place without stars.
So supernovae are actually responsible
for everything that's interesting
in the universe including planets
and people and things like that.
The way these supernova happen is these are very massive stars.
Much more massive than the sun.
Massive stars just tend to be very violent, very short lived.
They throw off a lot of material.
And then the shock wave from the supernova goes out and runs
into that and heats all that material up to
where we can see it again.
We had detected this
with another telescope called Spitzer,
which is a space telescope.
But Spitzer doesn't go out as far in wave length as SOFIA.
So that's kind of what we're trying to do here.
Is get this longer wave length observation.
It'll look just like a star if we end up seeing anything.
They didn't see anything last night either.
>> The scientist who is investigating the supernova,
they actually haven't found any data.
This is an important part of science I'm going
to bring back to the students.
Is that sometimes hypotheses are not supported.
And this is just as important as if they were supported.
>> We can turn all of these things
into teachable moments in our classroom.
Teaching about measurements, conversions, and units,
and then real life application of engineer design process.
How in the world is this plane even up in the air
with the side of it open?
>> The telescope is actually run by some gyroscopes.
The gyroscopes actually help to keep the pointing
of the telescope aimed at the right spot.
I have a little demonstration here I'd like to show
with a toy gyroscope and my toy airplane.
By the law of conservation
of angular momentum, when the telescope moves one way,
the gyroscope is going to move the other way
to keep everything in balance.
There we go.
So now we've got it.
And I'm going to be jiggling the airplane a little bit
to keep it on the board.
And this motion is very similar to the motion of the telescope
and trying to maintain pointing as the airplane is moving.
This is a magnetometer in a bottle.
And it's a real simple device.
Anybody can build it.
It's basically inside the bottle I have a mirror
and I have a magnet hooked on to that mirror.
And it's hanging by a string.
Over here on this side, I have a laser pointer.
And that laser pointer is pointing right at that mirror.
And it's reflecting over to the card on the back here
where we have it scaled.
And so as we travel through the various latitudes and longitudes
of the Earth's magnetic field while we're on the airplane,
this is going to move back and forth.
This is important to SOFIA because a lot
of the instruments are very sensitive
with the Earth's magnetic field.
>>So the grism, it splits the light,
and then it defracts it. So does it actually take
and make a finer set of spectra?
>> The prism itself will produce the dispersion.
What the grating does is it selects the order of how
that dispersion falls on the detector.
The advantage of a grism is the grism,
you can use a smaller optical component
to get the same dispersion.
And we can put those grisms right in the filter wheels.
Basically, it allows you to switch back and forth
between imaging and spectroscopy on the fly.
>> In talking to the astronomers
and astrophysicists here tonight,
provided great background and great context
for when I integrate a lot of the engineering challenges
that go along with SOFIA into my curriculum.
>> So there's this ring of dust and gas
about 3 light years' radius around the central cluster,
that super massive black hole.
If you look more closely,
you'll see that there's these dark bands
at some fixed distance away from that central cluster.
These are some of the contours from what we took from FORCAST.
So this is at 37 microns and you can see that the contours line
up pretty well with where those dark bands are located.
There's no other observatory that's capable
of looking at 37 microns.
But SOFIA is the only observatory capable
of getting this information right now.
>> This is very exciting to see the actual data being taken
and then eventually being able to be used
in research papers and research.
>> We've looked at supernova.
We looked at a donut ring around the galaxy.
We're looking at other objects in the sky.
A big red giant and the discs around it.
And all of these are parts of astronomy.
And astronomy is really amazing because if you look at it
in the infrared light, you're going to see it differently
than when you look at it in the visible light.
We'll be able to take some of the content we've learned here
and teach incoming 7th, 8th, and 9th graders.
At Air Camp U.S.A. all
about the infrared spectrum, different aspects
to the engineer design process with AFRL
at Wright-Patt in Dayton, Ohio.
And then also be able to show other applications of mapping,
of flight plans, the integration of the total systems.
>> One of the things
that I always thought was just incredible was the idea
of just exploration for the sake of exploration and to learn more
about our origins or possibly where we're going.
If my students were here tonight,
I would say that this SOFIA mission proves
that there is a purpose to learning.
There are so many applications in math, science,
and engineering that are being demonstrated here this evening.
That there are practical applications for things
that you wouldn't ordinarily think that you would use.
So it's kind of nice that I can use this as a reference point
when my students say, Mr. Jenkins,
why are we learning this?
And I can give them a specific example
and I could even tell them some of the wonderful people
that we've worked with tonight.
To accomplish this wonderful exploration.
>> The kids have sent me a lot of emails.
And they're just really anxious for me to get back
and tell them all about this opportunity.
I would definitely want to share to them all
of the different people that are involved
in getting this flight off the ground.
I think it's amazing how many paths people take
to come work at NASA.
How there's so many different jobs
and how well coordinated it is
to get this aircraft off the ground
and to get the science running
and to get the telescope running,
and to collect the data and everything that's involved
so that they realize that this is not just a one-man operation,
that NASA
is a lot of different people with a lot
of different backgrounds coming together
and getting this science done.
[Aircraft landing]
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