After 8 years of use, the telescope will finally be on the ground from September. The reason is very high costs and low success.
The NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) announced the end of the SOFIA flying observatory. the operation of sstratospheres THEobservatory for Iinfra-red ONEThe tronomy will be discontinued in September 2022.
in a convert Boeing 747SP that’s it 2.7 meter telescope regarding the troposphere he brought 12 to 14 kilometers high. As a result, the observations were in the distant future. infrared range possible, which would otherwise be filtered out by the large proportion of water vapor in this part of the Earth’s atmosphere.
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water on the moon
The community project started 2010Since 2014 it is fully functional. Since then, around 100 scientific flights accomplished, total were there 800.
A significant discovery in 2020 was the Detection of water molecules at the terrestrial side of the moon (reported in the future zone). SOFIA has also studied how galaxies develop and how stars and planets form from clouds of interstellar dust. In 2019, astronomers managed to do this for the first time with data from the telescope. helium hydride molecule prove in space. It is one of the building blocks of the early universe.
It’s not relevant enough
Now turn off the money tap on the telescope. In 2020, a study was commissioned to assess whether SOFIA’s operation should be extended (click here for the Decadal Survey). Scientists have come to the conclusion that the high operating costs are not justified.
Only 178 studies were written with the help of SOFIA by 2020. They were also not cited often enough to have any real impact on scientific progress, she concludes. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. ESA’s comparable Herschel telescope brought in the first 6 years 900 studies Outside.
As expensive as Hubble
Telescope operation is complex and only a fraction of the time spent on flights and maintenance can actually be used for scientific work. NASA is with $86 million per year involved, which corresponds to 80 percent of the costs. Germany was involved with 20%.
Total have been made to the flying observatory so far US$ 1.5 billion issued. Thus, the costs are comparable to those Hubble and Chandra. However, SOFIA’s scientific results would not justify this production and there would be no scenario in which the telescope’s productivity could be improved. So will SOFIA begin September 30, 2022 permanently discontinued.