RELEVANCE OF THE ISO EXPERIENCE TO SOFIA

摘要

SOFIA is an airborne observatory funded by NASA and DLR. A B747-SP aircraft is being modified to carry a 2.5 m telescope with a chopping secondary mirror. SOFIA will fly at an altitude of ～ 12.5 km, where the precipitable water vapour is less than 10 μm at zenith, therefore enabling observations in the near, mid, and far infrared and at submillimetre wavelengths. SOFIA will operate as a regular observatory with a set of well characterised facility instruments as well as with specialised principal investigator instruments. The facility instruments will be fully supported by SOFIA staff, and the data will be pipeline reduced and archived. SOFIA will make more than 140 flights/year, each about 8 hours long, starting in 2004. The expected lifetime of the mission is 20 years. Even though SOFIA in many respects differs from the ISO mission, it has many similarities and will encounter many of the same problems that we have heard about in this conference. Here we highlight some of the important lessons we learned during the conference week, and we hope that by learning from the ISO experience we can make SOFIA an even better observatory.