NASA will end operations of its observatory on a plane. The current mission extension will end on September 30, 2022.
The SOFIA is a modified Boeing 747 airplane that flies at altitudes of over 7 miles, which is above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere. It has been fitted with instruments that allow it to look in the mid to far-infrared. Its most famous finding was that there is liquid water on the moon's surface.
The overall performance of SOFIA has been disappointing. The biggest overview of astronomy goals for the next decade said there were concerns about SOFIA, given its high cost and modest scientific productivity.
NASA spends about the same amount of money on SOFIA as it does on major telescopes like Hubble and Chandra. The contributions made by SOFIA were nowhere close to the amount of scientific data and research papers produced by these two telescopes.
The unique position of SOFIA as an observatory on a plane may be the reason for some of the problems with its output. Major observatories require large teams of people to run, both to maintain the hardware and to collect the data, according to the report. It is difficult to coordinate getting this large staff onto a plane than it is to have them come and go from a ground-based facility.
The observatory has to be frequently grounded to allow for regular maintenance on the plane. Only a few percent of yearly calendar hours are turned into peer-reviewed science, an order of magnitude less than other astronomy observatories.
All the data collected by SOFIA will be publicly available for researchers to access after the end of September.
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