After that the aircraft will land at Palmdale, at what is the SOFIA operations center, and we’ll remove the upper rigid door, we’ll remove all the door systems, and we’ll be doing major telescope maintenance. We’ll actually remove the primary mirror so that we can aluminize the mirror in preparation for doing science.

We have a basic aircraft with a telescope that flies. But now these systems we’ve been talking about, the rest of the observatory systems, over the next five years we will be completing the development and installing these scientific systems onboard the aircraft such as the mission communication control system to control the telescope and the door that would be the aperture – the upper rigid door and the flexible lower door – and all that kind of stuff. All of those systems will gradually be put into the airplane over the next few years.

Then, in 2009, even though many of these systems won’t be complete, we’re going to initiate science flight operations. The plan is to bring on two science instruments, one US and one German, and we’re going to conduct a period called “early science.” What that means is that even though the observatory doesn’t have most of its eventual capability, we want to make sure at the absolute earliest opportunity that the aircraft is safe to operate with the door open and that tracking objects with the telescope is actually safe to do.

We actually want to start doing some astronomy, so we’ve got this early science program that consists of what we call “short science.” Each of these two instruments will be put on the telescope and we’ll do a number of flights to check out the telescope and the instrument and then go get some images, maybe go look at star-forming regions in Orion, or something like that. Or, depending on the time of year, maybe look at Sagittarius. So we’re going to get some images; we’ll get some spectra.

The two instruments are, right now, for the US instrument, FORCAST (Faint Object InfraRed Camera for the SOFIA Telescope), which is an infrared camera, and GREAT, which is a heterodyne spectrometer. We’ll just do a very short science program and that will give us some understanding of how well the observatory is working. We’ll go get some images and really show people why SOFIA is going to be a fabulous observatory.

Then, after a period of maybe a few months, while we’re continuing to install some hardware and software and enhance the capability of the observatory, from this most basic mode we’re going to go into what we call a “basic science period,” and that’s a fairly significant observing program with one instrument and we’re actually going to be soliciting proposals to involve people – astronomers – who are outside of the SOFIA program itself, who aren’t developing instruments. We want to engage the external scientific community to see how they would suggest using one of these two SOFIA instruments, FORCAST and GREAT.

Then we’d actually conduct a fairly good program, something meaningful on the order of maybe 50 to 100 observing hours, so actually flying probably 60 or so total hours, or maybe up to 120 hours, but we want to get about 50 to 100 hours of something that’s of real significant scientific value. We don’t know exactly what that’s going to be. We certainly have targets given the time of year and the performance that we expect to get out of the telescope.

We need to stay within the vicinity of the Dryden and Edwards Air Force Base area, Again, this is very early in the flight test and operation of the observatory, so we’re making sure that this is done with the utmost safety. We’re not quite sure what the observatory ops will be, but, for example, we’re not flying over the ocean or things like that. That’s in 2009. I think we’re starting to see some excitement return here in the external science community, so we’re heavily engaged in making sure we can pull off doing science in 2009.

After that we’re going to increase frequency. In the early years there’s not a whole lot of science done. Starting in 2009 we’ll actually have the capability to start doing science, longer duration flights, greater frequency. So we’ll get into this mode where the aircraft comes down after flying this basic science, we integrate some additional capability into the observatory, we fly a little science, we improve the capabilities of the observatory by adding on things that have always been in the program but aren’t finished yet. We’ll get those in, we’ll do some flight tests, we’ll go fly some more science, we’ll do some more astronomy, we’ll land, and we’ll do some more capability development.

We’ll go through that process and as time goes on, essentially, we’ll arrive at what we call “full operational capability” – FOC – in late 2013 or early 2014. At that time all of the capability that we would have expected of the observatory is complete. We’re ready to really conduct normal operations and really leverage off our lessons learned over the previous years, operate efficiently, and the ultimate goal is to essentially obtain about a thousand hours of meaningful astronomy annually. I believe the Kuiper, at its peak, operated something on the order of about 400 hours per year. Fairly early on in the SOFIA program – I don’t actually know the calendar year – but before we get to FOC, even though we’re not operating at maximum efficiency, we’re still learning things about the observatory, we’re still doing system development, and we will actually be flying more observing flights than Kuiper ever did.