| Abstract |
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a joint
U.S./German Project to develop and operate a 2.5-meter infrared airborne
telescope in a Boeing 747-SP that flies in the stratosphere at altitudes
as high as 45,000 and is capable of observations from 0.3 µm to 1.6 mm
with an average transmission greater than 80 percent. SOFIA will be staged
out of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center aircraft operations facility
at Palmdale, CA and the SOFIA Science Mission Operations Center (SSMOC)
will be located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, CA. First
science flights will begin in 2009, the next instrument call and the first
General Observer science call will be in 2010, and a full operations
schedule of about 120 8 to 10 hour flights per year will begin in by 2014.
The observatory is expected to operate for more than 20 years. SOFIA will
initially fly with nine focal plane instruments that include broadband
imagers, moderate resolution spectrographs that will resolve broad
features due to dust and large molecules, and high resolution
spectrometers capable of studying the kinematics of molecular and atomic
gas lines at km/s resolution. We describe the facility SOFIA facility and
outline the opportunities for observations by the general scientific
community, future instrumentation developments, and operations
collaborations. The operational characteristics of the SOFIA
first-generation instruments are summarized and we give several specific
examples of the types of scientific studies to which these instruments are
expected to make fundamental scientific contributions. Results from
the initial early science flights will be described.
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