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Mock-up, United
Airlines, Sen Gramm, EXES, Lightweighting
 Foreground:
A full-sized mock-up of the telescope cavity, containing
a model of the 2.5-meter telescope.
Background: The SOFIA aircraft, now undergoing modification at Raytheon's
Waco facility. |
At Raytheon's huge
hangar facility in Waco, Texas, an arresting sight has unfolded
in recent months: engineers have brought in an actual section of
a cut-up Boeing 747SP in order to test out solutions to various
engineering challenges posed by the sheer size of SOFIA's telescope
cavity. That's a huge hole in the fuselage that extends approximately
1/4 of the way around the plane's circumference, marking the largest
opening ever cut in an operational Boeing 747. Inside this full-sized
mock-up of the cavity, which provides test engineers with a terrifically
versatile simulation testbed, sits a remarkably life-like, full-scale
model of the telescope.
This sophisticated mock-up-within-a-mock-up
sits side-by-side with the SOFIA plane itself, which has been gutted
and is now being reconfigured piece by piece to meet the observatory's
requirements.
On March 1, SOFIA partner United
Airlines began airing a dynamic, four-minute in-flight video
about the observatory, featuring NASA animation and sound bites
from many of the project's key staff members. Several million
United passengers per month will see the video, planned as the
first of many subsequent in-flight reports about SOFIA. Simultaneously,
United debuted http://www.ual-sofia.com,
a colorful site dedicated to the company's role in the observatory,
linking to the SOFIA home page.
On Saturday, February 12, Texas Sen.
Phil Gramm took time out of his busy schedule to walk through the
plane and view the striking adjacent mock-up. After the tour, he
took questions from the press about the significance of SOFIA as
the world's largest airborne observatory, commenting, "The farther
we look out, the further back we can see and the more we can learn.
Figuring out how the universe works is important for its own sake,
but also because the quest creates jobs, growth and opportunity
for our people."
 Senator
Phil Gramm and SOFIA Project Manager Tom Bonner look over
informational materials about infrared astronomy during Sen.
Gramm's visit to Raytheon facilities in Waco, Texas, on February
12. |
He added, "America's commitment to
space science and technology has dramatically improved the way
every one of us lives."
Meanwhile, in laboratories throughout
the U.S. and Germany, work continues to move along on development
and construction of SOFIA's 10 initial instruments. On February
17, the Echelon
Cross Echelle Spectrograph (EXES) instrument team, headed by
principal investigator Dr. John Lacy of the University
of Texas at Austin, took their prototype instrument on a long
journey across the Texas plains to the university's McDonald Observatory
in Fort Davis. Since scientists can utilize versatile EXES with
both ground-based and airborne observatories, the team is now testing
the prototype by bolting it to the McDonald telescope to make Earth-based
test scientific observations.
November 10, 2000
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