Related papers: Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy

The SOFIA telescope as the heart of the observatory is a major technological challenge. I present an overview on the astro-nomical and scientific requirements for such a big airborne observatory and demonstrate the impact of these…

This paper presents the concept of a community-accessible stratospheric balloon-based observatory that is currently under preparation by a consortium of European research institutes and industry. The planned European Stratospheric Balloon…

Dedicated to spectroscopic and imaging observations of the ultraviolet sky, the World Space Observatory for Ultraviolet Project is a Russia led international collaboration presently involving also China, Germany, Italy, Spain and Ukraine.…

Observations that require large physical instrument dimensions and/or a considerable amount of cryogens, as it is for example the case for high spatial resolution far infrared astronomy, currently still face technological limits for their…

We report on the measurements of telluric water vapor made with the instrument FIFI-LS on SOFIA. Since November 2018, FIFI-LS has measured the water vapor overburden with the same measurement setup on each science flight with about 10 data…

Classical novae inject chemically enriched gas and dust into the local inter-stellar medium (ISM). Abundances in the ejecta can be deduced from infrared (IR) forbidden line emission. IR spectroscopy can determine the mineralogy of grains…

The most important limitation for ground-based submillimetre (submm) astronomy is the broad-band absorption of the total water vapour in the atmosphere above an observation site, often expressed as the Precipitable Water Vapour (PWV). A…

Technical description of the new project called All Sky Automated Survey and results of the tests of our prototype instrument are presented. The ultimate goal of this project is photometric monitoring of the large area of the sky with fully…

Research activities during the last decade have shown the strong potential of photonic devices to greatly simplify ground based and space borne astronomical instruments and to improve their performance. We focus specifically on the…

SOFIA presents a number of interesting challenges for the development of a data reduction environment which, at its initial phase, will have to incorporate pipelines from seven different instruments. Therefore, the SOFIA data reduction…

The HIgh-Resolution Mid-infrarEd Spectrometer (HIRMES) is the 3rd Generation Instrument for the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), currently in development at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), and due for…

LISA is a proposed low resolution (R~15-30) imaging spectrometer for SOFIA, the American-German Stratospheric Observatory for Far Infrared Astronomy. Covering the wavelength range from 40micron to 220micron with three channels, LISA…

The proposed SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP) mission will have a two-meter class telescope delivering diffraction-limited images to an instrumented 0.7 square-degree field sensitive in the visible and near-infrared wavelength regime. We…

The World Space Observatory Project is a new space mission concept, grown out the needs of the Astronomical community to have access to the part of the electromagnetic spectrum where all known physics can be studied on all possible time…

We propose SILVIA (Space Interferometer Laboratory Voyaging towards Innovative Applications), a mission concept designed to demonstrate ultra-precision formation flying between three spacecraft separated by 100 m. SILVIA aims to achieve…

We describe the design and construction of GREAT, the German REceiver for Astronomy at Terahertz frequencies operated on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). GREAT is a modular dual-color heterodyne instrument for…

The "Airships: A New Horizon for Science" study at the Keck Institute for Space Studies investigated the potential of a variety of airships currently operable or under development to serve as observatories and science instrumentation…

SPICA (Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics) is a JAXA led observatory that will operate in the mid and far infrared wavelength range (5-210 micron) with unprecedented sensitivity, thanks to the 3.5 m (current baseline)…

World Space Observatory UltraViolet (WSO-UV) is a multipurpose space observatory, made by a 170 cm aperture telescope, capable of UV high-resolution spectroscopy, long slit low-resolution spectroscopy, and deep UV and optical imaging. With…

The Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO) is an R&D project to plan and design the next observatory to detect gamma rays in the Southern hemisphere. The experiment, planned to be placed at an altitude greater than 4400 m, is…