How NASA's flying observatory revealed secrets about Pluto
The airplane was already flying off the southwest coast of New Zealand when a group of astronomers in Chile phoned a group of scientists in Massachusetts, who then called the scientist aboard the aircraft, who told the navigator they had to change course.
The airplane was not a typical passenger jet or cargo aircraft but a mobile scientific observatory called SOFIA, which stands for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.
On June 29, 2015, SOFIA was chasing a moving target in the sky: the shadow of the dwarf planet Pluto. For about 2 minutes, the icy world would be passing in front of a star -- an event called an occultation (or, sometimes, an eclipse). Observing this event held incredible promise for Pluto scientists, but it meant getting SOFIA in exactly the right spot for them to see it.
"When [an occultation] happens with Pluto, we can watch the interaction between the light from the star and Pluto's atmosphere, and learn about the atmosphere from Earth-based measurements, without having to actually go out there and see what's going on," Michael Person, a research scientist and director of the Wallace Astrophysical Observatory at MIT, told reporters at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
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