Peering through the dust and gas

Scientists and school teachers alike are taking to the skies this year in NASA’s heavily-modified jumbo jet and exploring the galaxy with an airborne infrared telescope.

But once they’re back on the ground, their roles are a little bit different. While scientists parse the data and make new discoveries on star formation and development, the teachers, like Foothill College physics professor David Marasco, are tasked to bring their experience and what they’ve learned to kids all over the country.

Marasco teamed up with Los Altos resident Dan Burns, a teacher at Los Gatos High School, to take part in a 10-hour flight on an airborne observatory called the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, also known as SOFIA. The ship is a Boeing 747 with a large infrared telescope inside, and its missions involve flying at 41,000 feet — well above normal air traffic — to get a good look at what’s going on in the night sky.

“There’s the added excitement factor of location,” Marasco said. “You can do (measurements) way up in the atmosphere.”

The SOFIA Science Center is based out of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, but the observatory itself is stationed in the Southern California city of Palmdale. SOFIA makes about 25 trips per year, meeting only a portion of the demand from researchers who would like to use it to study comets, atmospheres and star formation, according to a NASA audit report.

Marasco and Burns applied to tag along with scientists on SOFIA as education “ambassadors,” who take a crash course in graduate-level astronomy, and get a better understanding of what exactly scientists are doing in the stratosphere with a telescope and what they hope to find using an infrared telescope. Marasco said getting accepted as an ambassador isn’t about how savvy they are with physics and science, but about how much they are willing to take that experience and share it with a broad audience.

“They see who they think would do the best job doing outreach, not necessarily who has the best science background. Art and English teachers have an appeal,” he said.

The flight marks a second chance to ride in a flying observatory for Burns, a former aerospace engineer for Lockheed Martin who said he had to pass up the opportunity the first time. Burns said he had been working as a student teacher at Independence High School around the time that the Kuiper Observatory, the predecessor to SOFIA, was taking to the sky in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His teacher was the woman in charge of the educator-ride-along program, which gave him an easy way into the program. But he had to turn it down, he said, because of other things going on in his life.

“I just started teaching and we had a baby at home and another on the way. I couldn’t take anything else on,” Burns said.

But when things started to settle down for Burns, Kuiper was mothballed and NASA started investing in SOFIA, he said. SOFIA took much longer to get up and running after a number of delays and setbacks, and eventually Burns stopped thinking about it until Marasco brought up the idea of riding along this year as a team.

“It’s kind of like an opportunity that I missed that came back 20 years later,” Burns said.

Observing the unseen

SOFIA measures infrared light in space to observe what normally goes unseen. Marasco said plenty of objects in the night sky have achieved fusion and are very hot, but plenty of phenomena are too cold or obscured by dust and gas to observe.

That’s where infrared comes in. By measuring a wide range of infrared wavelengths outside of the visible spectrum, scientists can see through obstructions and observe anything from the formation of distant solar systems to characteristics of planets here in our own solar system. The Kuiper Observatory, for example, helped discover that there are rings around Uranus.

While infrared telescopes provide useful information, the technology is tricky to use. Infrared is almost impossible to detect by observatories on the ground, Burns said, because water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs infrared radiation. Placing observatories in dry climates and on top of mountains can help, but the best way to get around the problem is to bring the telescope up into the stratosphere, above over 99 percent of the water vapor.

“SOFIA can see regions of infrared no other telescope can see right now,” Burns said. “It gives us a window into the universe that, without SOFIA, would be shuttered.”

The other alternative, launching infrared telescopes into space to make observations, has its own host of problems as well, Burns said. The instruments aboard the telescope need to be cooled down to around the same temperature as the things they’re observing, which means about 4 degrees Kelvin — or -452 degrees Fahrenheit — to operate properly.

Burns said the telescope relies on what he described as a plumbing system for liquid helium and other cold substances to keep the temperature down, and once a space telescope runs out of coolant, its own infrared radiation starts to obscure the results and limit its usefulness for research.

Launching a satellite also requires committing billions of dollars of funding towards technology that, when finally launched, is already several years old, Marasco said.

“As soon as it gets put on that rocket, that is what you’re going to get,” Marasco said. “Instruments on (SOFIA) can be replaced, and we don’t have to care about the weight of instruments on a 747.”

Spreading the word

Once Marasco and Burns complete the as-yet unscheduled 10-hour flight, it’s up to them to take their experience aboard SOFIA and bring it to the rest of the community.

That shouldn’t be a problem for Marasco, who helps to put on a physics show for thousands of students in the Bay Area each year. Marasco said the show, which is done at Foothill’s 1,000-seat Smithwick Theatre, is very popular and frequently sells out. There, students can see live experiments on stage, learn about things like inertia and angular momentum, and watch Marasco get hit with a sledgehammer while sandwiched between two beds of nails.

Half of the show’s proceeds go toward renting school buses to give schools with a large population of low-income students a free trip to the show.

“A lot of them might have parents that haven’t even graduated high school,” Marasco said. “We’re very happy to do this outreach.”

Burns, on the other hand, runs a special workshop for teachers in the Bay Area that are new to physics, and may not know how to use all the gadgets and equipment at their disposal. The program, called “Physics Teacher SOS,” provides more than $10,000 in teaching equipment each year, and Burns, along with other experienced physics teachers, explains teaching methods and how to conduct experiments in the classroom.

“David (Marasco) comes and sits in the back and offers suggestions. He doesn’t really learn anything from the workshops, he just likes to help the teachers, too,” Burns said.

Marasco called Burns one of the preeminent physics teachers in the Bay Area, and said that he has quite the audience for some of his YouTube videos. One video where Burns showed how objects in space interact with one another in space-time accrued close to 10 million views.

“Once it comes down to implementing this we will be in contact because he’s a really bright guy,” Marasco said.

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