Seeing the Unseen - SOFIA

“Seeing the Unseen” was the theme of the workshop devoted to the SOFIA mission.  SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, is a joint mission of NASA, the German aerospace center DLR, and USRA (Universities Space Research Associates).  The workshop began with a talk from the University of Chicago’s Al Harper about the history of airborne astronomy.  Describing his early years of research at Rice University, Al discussed the challenges of stabilizing a telescope in a Lear jet in the 1960’s, and the applications of that learning to today’s SOFIA mission.Al Harper illustrates the data from early airborne research

In another keynote session, Yerkes engineer Marc Berthoud treated teachers to a tour of the Yerkes laboratories where his contributions to the HAWC (High-resolution Airborne Wide-band Camera) instrument are made.  HAWC is one of the first-generation instruments for SOFIA.  Teachers were interested with how the electronics of the instrument were kept at super-cool temperatures to distinguish distant objects from “noise” within the camera itself.Yerkes engineer Marc Berthoud describes the HAWC instrument

Workshop leader and ARCS teacher Kathy Schmidt organized the day with a compliment of breakout sessions.   Pulsar teacher Kathy Gustavson described how signals from Very Low Frequency (VLF) waves produced by lightning,  get dispersed when traveling around the Earth and along magnetic field lines in the magnetosphere. These phenomena help us understand how electromagnetic waves produced in the universe get dispersed on their way to Earth, which also helps us find the distance to these pulsars.   Kathy Gustavson describes the path of VLF waves in the magnetosphere