Costly SOFIA telescope faces termination after years of problems
nature.com
nature.com
> SOFIA’s publication rate is now starting to creep up, and last year it was 33 papers. The ultimate goal is 75 to 100 papers per year, says James Jackson, associate director for research at the Universities Space Research Association, the Maryland-based group that manages SOFIA. “More than 150 was a stretch goal,” he says.
I really, really hope they found a better way of assessing the telescope's value than number of papers published. "75 to 100 papers per year" feels like a bit of a Freudian slip as to what professional science sees as its ultimate goal.
Scientific incentives are so insanely wrong that it's hard not to see everything not directly supporting an immediate application flaming out within the next 50-100 years (assuming no major course corrections).
I'd probably still be a scientist if things were better. But they're not.
Incidentally, this is why the science worship/science fetishism is so cringe-inducing for those of us who've been down at the coal face (ok, for me it was the iron face in Soudan, but whatever). The process, capital-S Science, is worthy. What we have now is not that.
If you think this costly and relatively unproductive apparatus should continue to receive funding, is there any circumstance which would cause you to discontinue it in favor of something else (which is not a direct replacement)?
And for every cancelled experiment / unfunded grant - there is someone else getting that money instead. I want to believe that savings from the operations of the SOFIA will be channeled into another scientific project. I am pretty sure there is a lot of smart folks out there that will happily convert newly available budget into interesting observations.
The relevant example here is SOPHIA's predecessor, the Kuiper observatory, which was used up until Sophia came online, then basically set aside and allowed to rot.
This image (1) shows said observatory in 2016, I'm sure it looks even worse by now.
(1) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Kuiper_A...
I can only hope that one or both of those birds are put into static display on a museum so we can enjoy them for years to come.
They are unique machines that simply are not created by most private enterprise, and I believe have significant historical value even in the early few years after they are taken out of service, but before they are considered an artifact worth studying for historic value.
In the same way that a 2010 computer is not considered vintage yet (seems like IME, WinXP era is starting to be considered vintage ish), but will be considered vintage in another five or six years, airplanes seem to go through a crucible in between being taken out of active service and being preserved or restored for historic reasons.
In said crucible, the birds need to escape being scrapped or exposed to the elements to rust away from the inside, before people notice that this thing is a survivor and worth preserving.
The inner city of Amsterdam barely escaped that fate and that's a very large object where at least some people would be directly influenced by the decision to destroy it being farsighted enough to realize that this is a terrible mistake. But for subjects such as these the destruction happens on a much smaller scale and not enough people will notice in time to avoid a disaster.
Yes, lots of those are just 'nerdy interests' but there are families who have built lives around supporting SOPHIA and likely at least some involved in Kuiper before her, and we're gointg to shut it all down, we should at least record what it was like before it stops, what it was like before they weld the airplane doors shut so morons don't try to parkour inside, get injured, and sue the museum etc., a necessary activity that still restricts the public from more fully understanding what this entire system (bird, observatory, support structures, experiments, results, an dmore) was like, and that's in a best case where NASA puts SOPHIA on display somewhere instead of the much more common [park her and cannibalize her parts, move her to a boneyard, scrap her] pipeline that ends most (admittedly pretty common) birds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747SP
The original 747-100 had a much shorter range than the 747-400 (due to earlier, fuel-thirsty engines and a bunch of other early design decisions). The SP was shortened and modified extensively to achieve roughly the range of the -400, albeit with fewer passengers, but was obsolescent by the early 1980s.
SOFIA was built into an aircraft that first flew in 1977: today it's a 45-year old example of a plane with a 30 year design life, and unlike the B-52 there is no deep-pocket Pentagon contract paying for long-term maintenance.
(Yes, putting her out to pasture in an aviation museum would be the ideal fate for this historic aircraft.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_Observatory_for_...
That's what I get for reading what feels like 80 aircraft articles in a 2-hour wiki walk, I'm bound to get some details mixed up!
Sofia, like any telescope, is a tool that we use to learn about the universe. It has a cost to keep running, and that cost needs to be weighed against alternative uses for that budget.
The primary benefit of SOFIA over ground-based telescopes is that you avoid a level of interference and distortion from our atmosphere. Space-based telescopes offer the same benefit, with the additional benefit of not subjecting the optics to turbulent air. With the advance of adaptive optics on ground-based telescopes and with private space companies competing to bring the cost of a launch down, there are probably more cost-effective solutions to the problems SOFIA was designed decades ago to solve.
We are losing afaict unique scientific capabilities with this shutdown, the least we can do is document it well so the next multi billion dollar project to regain said capabilities has clearer acceptance criteria.
SOFIA is accessible in a way that space telescopes aren't. This allows switching instruments, upgrading instruments, and development of new instruments that can't be done in active space telescopes.
Its development and maintenance cost to date is a bit over 1/10 the cost of Webb to date.
Plus it's really cool to cut a hole in an airplane and stick a telescope out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower#Demoli...
And all that just to make room for another generic housing block or one more multi level parking garage.
I am certain this will be considered a big mistake in the future and might even result in an inexact 1:1 replica being build just for the tourist novelty potential.
Me thinking it's cool you told this story aside, The C-141 itself has a bit of a temperamental reputation, I'm not surprised to hear even the one they tapped to play nice with their stratospheric observatory was still grumpy, though that may be my bias being part of the C-130 orbit.
are they saying they discovered the issue based on her observations, or that something she did gave the scope this error?
It was as expensive to operate as an observatory plus a jumbo jet plus an observatory actually mounted in a jumbo jet. That is a problem, but does not mean "years of problems". It was doing good science, but cost as much as a lot of other things combined. Still: it would take many more years for the cost to approach that of just getting the James Webb infrared telescope built and launched: like, 200 years.
Maybe its high cost relative to some other projects made it seem like it was stealing money people wanted to spend on their own projects. That would be honest to say without inventing trouble.