With SOFIA's unique scientific capabilities, we expect significant contributions to many areas of modern astronomical research. SOFIA is expected to significatly contribute to or solve several of the key issues in the following areas:

Solar System Pre-solar nebulae, circumstellar dust shells and dust rings are the building blocks of solar systems and it is believed, are closely related to the origin of life. Our solar system is the obvious place to study the conditions and processes which lead to the formation of planets and the evolution of their surfaces and atmospheres, and to search for traces of pre-biological chemistry. It is therefore essential to study primordial bodies like comets and asteroids as well as the evolved planets and their satellites.	Comet IRAS-Araki-Alcock
Star & Star Formation Stars generally form through a fragmented collapse of a molecular cloud as a group or cluster. This simple picture seems to be generally true but bears many unsolved details.	Beta Pictoris Dust Disk
Interstellar Matter The ISM reflects the global history of a galaxy. Since most of the ISM is cold or, in the presence of a radiation field, warm, most of its continuum radiation and spectral line emission emerges in the MIR, FIR, and Submm. SOFIA is thus the only observatory ideally suited to study these processes.	Eagle Nebula, M16
Evolution Of Galaxies With the advent of larger ground-based and space borne telescopes, covering a broad spectral range, galactic evolution has grown into a major research area. SOFIA will significantly contribute to, or solve, several of the key issues.	Whirlpool Galaxy