Airborne observatory
Telescopes carried by aircraft / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Airborne observatory?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
An airborne observatory is an airplane or airship with an astronomical telescope. By carrying the telescope to a sufficiently high altitude, the telescope can avoid cloud cover, pollution, and carry out observations in the infrared spectrum, above water vapor in the atmosphere which absorbs infrared radiation. Some drawbacks to this approach are the instability of the lifting platform, the weight restrictions on the instrument, the need to safely recover the gear afterward, and the cost compared to a comparable ground-based observatory.
Multiple observations of solar eclipses were performed from 1920 to 1980. NASA created first specialised airborne observatory, Galileo, in 1965. SOFIA, the latest such observatory, was retired in 2022.