Austin: It’s an 80-20 partnership. In the broadest sense, the Germans – DLR is the German space agency – they actually funded the development of the telescope that is now in the aircraft. They designed and built that. And I think, although I wasn’t on the program at the time when the telescope was delivered, but I believe it was installed in the aircraft around 2004, and there have been quite a few ground tests and the first ‘activation’ flight to begin to exercise the TA control system.

So that’s their telescope, and integrating it into the aircraft was done by the US. The telescope was their major contribution as far as the hardware on SOFIA goes. They’re also developing science instruments as well, so out of the nine instruments currently under development for the first generation, two of those are German instruments. There’s a German instrument called GREAT (German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahetz Frequencies), and another one called FIFI (Field Imaging Far-Infrared Line Spectrometer). FIFI is being developed at the Max-Planck-Institut near Munich, at a place called Garching, and GREAT is at another Max-Planck-Institut in Bonn.

So, a couple of the science instruments, essentially 20-percent of the science opportunity, is funded by the Germans. They’re also providing staff long-term as part of the twenty-or-so years of observatory operations. We have a German contractor organization through the Deutsche SOFIA Institut – DSI – in Stuttgart. They’re providing a portion of the staff to assist in engineering maintenance and operation of the telescope. Their work is kind of matrixed into the US observatory organization, whose key element is science instruments, labs and science support, data archiving, and support to the investigator community. They’re also contributing in other areas as well, such as instrumentation for flight test. That’s a real big part of the collaboration.

The 80-percent on the US side includes the aircraft and the modification work to get the telescope in the airplane; build the bulkhead, door and the drive system; and the fairly complicated mission communication control system. So the interior of the aircraft aft of the flight deck on the first floor is….all of the passenger seats have been removed to get consoles in there for operating the telescope and the door, and operating the science instruments, and taking data and whatnot.

NASA is funding seven science instruments. We’re building up a staff to actually operate the observatory and provide the same kinds of services you would get from a Hubble Space Telescope organization or the Spitzer Science Center. On the US side, in addition to the aircraft, the ground facilities are furnished by the US and outfitted generally by the US, as are the science instruments laboratories, the optics labs, and then a significant staff to actually operate the observatory, essentially in any mode, like a ground-based observatory in some ways and in some ways like a space-based observatory.

People who want to do research can go into our data archives and we offer, as do other observatories, proposal tools….you know, how do you become a researcher on SOFIA, what kind of objects do you want to look at and why, etc.? The US side does the scientific peer review and selections for the observing proposals for US telescope time, as well as the German side peer reviews and selection of proposals against German telescope time. Every four years or so we do new calls for science instrumentation, and then we fund the US science instruments and technology programs.

NTB: One of the major modifications made to the 747 was the cutting of a large 16-foot hole in the aft fuselage to accommodate the telescope and the installation of a special door that will open and close in flight. Has this ever been tried before?