An infrared camera called the High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera-Plus (HAWC+) was installed on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, this spring. This is the only currently operating astronomical camera that makes images using far-infrared light, allowing studies of low-temperature early stages of star and planet formation.
Professor Giles Novak, CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow Fabio Santos, and Visiting Scholar Marc Berthoud are part of the team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that developed the instrument. (Drs. Santos and Berthoud are pictured with the SOFIA plane, left.)