SIM To Bear Cost of Resurrecting SOFIA

摘要

With NASA deciding to press ahead with the SOFIA airborne astronomy observatory, another mission — an expensive planet-hunting spacecraft in development for more than a decade — is being scaled back to a mere technology-development program. The restoration of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a U.S.-German effort to field a Boeing 747 jetliner equipped with a 2.5-meter telescope, had been widely antic-ipated.