5 ms·

Costly SOFIA telescope faces termination after years of problems

48 points by digital55 4y ago

rexreed 4y ago
Meanwhile, lots of startups crash and burn raising multiples of the annual budget of SOFIA in just a single round. Says something about priorities. Even though there's low cost/benefit on SOFIA, surely, pumping $600M into a single round for a startup that ends up laying off thousands of workers has even lower cost / benefit? Imagine, instead of one round into Unicorn-Here-Today-Gone-Tomorrow, you could fund SOFIA for 7 years.
ncmncm 4y ago
"Years of problems" looks like an outright falsehood. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
flovec 4y ago
I worked on some components of SOFIA - the "garage door" actuators - at my first job after engineering school in 2008 ish. The actuators, 1 upper and 1 lower if I recall correctly, had large Titanium gears which required lubricant. NASA was pressing for a dry-film lubricant (something like what would normally be a backup lubricant in a helicopter gearbox if the primary lubricant failed) because large gobs of the lubricant might otherwise end up in unwanted places (the telescope!) with a large hole open on the aircraft. The company I worked for was against this, but was running tests on the gears with only dry-film lubricant applied at the time. I don't remember the results of the tests, but I do remember learning how to lock-wire on those test actuators which I had to repeatedly take apart for inspection!
entropicgravity 4y ago
It looks like SOFIA and Webb are operating at similar frequencies. Could it be just a coincidence that SOFIA is being turned off just as Webb is passing its validation tests?
Multicomp 4y ago
I think this is a bummer, birds need exercise in order to stay useful, and when they are no longer flown, the capability to change that decision decays away very quickly for airplanes. 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_Airborne_Observatory_in_2016.jpg 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.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That looks incredibly sad. You are spot on, there is a period between when stuff is used daily and when it is determined to be of historic significance where objects that would have been determined to be of historic significance are at risk of being demolished or recycled. 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.
  - Multicomp 4y ago
    Exactly! SOPHIA is not just the bird herself. How many jobs of historical interest are going away here? (No, I don't think we should keep all jobs forever) How many seasons of a reality show could be made about the person who maintains the telescope itself? The telescope support system? Heck, even the engineering of Ye Olde 747-400 and how different it is from other 747s in terms of maintenance costs and procedures. 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.
jl6 4y ago
From another Nature article, linked on this page (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00685-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00685-2): > 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.
- tamcap 4y ago
  It's easy to agree that number of papers published is a poor indicator of "quality" or "quantity" of raw science generated... but we hardly have anything better. Publication record is the currency at the moment. 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.
- bmitc 4y ago
  It's truly unfortunate. Science should be about understanding how wrong we are just as much or even more than understanding how right we are. And yet, the push to publish puts things on safety rails to make sure you're always right. It's like putting blinders on science when we should be letting it run free.
- exmadscientist 4y ago
  It's refreshing to at least see them admit their lunacy here! 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.
miguelazo 4y ago
Sure it costs a lot to operate compared to other missions, but look at what it costs compared to the average useless project at DoD/Pentagon. This country needs to get its priorities straight!
timw4mail 4y ago
Aw, another rare 747SP down.

48 points by digital55 4y ago

Meanwhile, lots of startups crash and burn raising multiples of the annual budget of SOFIA in just a single round. Says something about priorities. Even though there's low cost/benefit on SOFIA, surely, pumping $600M into a single round for a startup that ends up laying off thousands of workers has even lower cost / benefit? Imagine, instead of one round into Unicorn-Here-Today-Gone-Tomorrow, you could fund SOFIA for 7 years.

ncmncm 4y ago

"Years of problems" looks like an outright falsehood. 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

flovec 4y ago

I worked on some components of SOFIA - the "garage door" actuators - at my first job after engineering school in 2008 ish. The actuators, 1 upper and 1 lower if I recall correctly, had large Titanium gears which required lubricant. NASA was pressing for a dry-film lubricant (something like what would normally be a backup lubricant in a helicopter gearbox if the primary lubricant failed) because large gobs of the lubricant might otherwise end up in unwanted places (the telescope!) with a large hole open on the aircraft. The company I worked for was against this, but was running tests on the gears with only dry-film lubricant applied at the time. I don't remember the results of the tests, but I do remember learning how to lock-wire on those test actuators which I had to repeatedly take apart for inspection!

entropicgravity 4y ago

It looks like SOFIA and Webb are operating at similar frequencies. Could it be just a coincidence that SOFIA is being turned off just as Webb is passing its validation tests?

Multicomp 4y ago

I think this is a bummer, birds need exercise in order to stay useful, and when they are no longer flown, the capability to change that decision decays away very quickly for airplanes. 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_Airborne_Observatory_in_2016.jpg 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.

jacquesm 4y ago
That looks incredibly sad. You are spot on, there is a period between when stuff is used daily and when it is determined to be of historic significance where objects that would have been determined to be of historic significance are at risk of being demolished or recycled. 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.
- Multicomp 4y ago
  Exactly! SOPHIA is not just the bird herself. How many jobs of historical interest are going away here? (No, I don't think we should keep all jobs forever) How many seasons of a reality show could be made about the person who maintains the telescope itself? The telescope support system? Heck, even the engineering of Ye Olde 747-400 and how different it is from other 747s in terms of maintenance costs and procedures. 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.

jl6 4y ago

From another Nature article, linked on this page (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00685-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00685-2): > 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.

tamcap 4y ago
It's easy to agree that number of papers published is a poor indicator of "quality" or "quantity" of raw science generated... but we hardly have anything better. Publication record is the currency at the moment. 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.
bmitc 4y ago
It's truly unfortunate. Science should be about understanding how wrong we are just as much or even more than understanding how right we are. And yet, the push to publish puts things on safety rails to make sure you're always right. It's like putting blinders on science when we should be letting it run free.
exmadscientist 4y ago
It's refreshing to at least see them admit their lunacy here! 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.

miguelazo 4y ago

Sure it costs a lot to operate compared to other missions, but look at what it costs compared to the average useless project at DoD/Pentagon. This country needs to get its priorities straight!

timw4mail 4y ago

Aw, another rare 747SP down.