NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy flies over the snow- covered Sierra Nevada mountains with its telescope door open during a test flight.

 NASA

A NASA jumbo jet with one of the best window seats on the planet is about to join the permanent collection at the Pima Air & Space Museum.

The recently retired Boeing 747 with a 17-ton telescope sticking out of the side of it landed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base late Tuesday morning, after its final flight from Palmdale, California.

Known as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA for short, the heavily modified airliner would soar above Earth’s atmospheric distortions to study everything from distant black holes to the composition of objects in our solar system.

The aircraft completed its final science flight on Sept. 29 after eight years in service.

The museum on East Valencia Road near Interstate 10 already has one of the world’s largest collections of unique NASA aircraft — and it already has a 747 on site — but museum CEO Scott Marchand said, “This one was too special to miss out on.”

He said the museum obtained the aircraft from NASA “for a small fee,” with the help of representatives from the Federal Government Services Administration’s Surplus Property Donation Program.

“Once NASA decided that it was not going to keep the aircraft at one of its locations and the National Air & Space Museum declined, we were the next-best destination,” Marchand said. “Truthfully, there are not many museums with the ability to land a 747 or manage it once it is on the ground, so in this instance we ended up being the sole museum to formally express interest.”

The final flight crew for NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy poses next to the aircraft after signing the fuselage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on Tuesday. The flying telescope is headed for retirement at Pima Air & Space Museum.

SOFIA will spend the next month or so parked at Davis-Monthan before being towed to the museum on a dedicated path that connects it to the base by way of Tucson’s famed airplane boneyard, officially known as 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group.

Marchand said it will take about 30 minutes to roll the 747 to the museum’s restoration facility, where it will undergo several months of decommissioning, supervised and paid for by NASA.

Depending on the speed of that work, the aircraft could go on display sometime in April, though it should be visible to museum visitors from a distance before then, Marchand said.

NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy aircraft lands at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on Tuesday after its final flight from Palmdale, California. The retired airborne telescope will go on display at Pima Air & Space Museum next year.

Round-trip flight

Tucson is a fitting place for SOFIA to end up, according to renowned infrared astronomer George Rieke, Regents’ professor at the University of Arizona.

He said the aircraft is the “final embodiment” of an airborne astronomy program that was pioneered by key figures at UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

The lab’s founder, world famous astronomer Gerard Kuiper, “used an infrared telescope in a Convair 990 airplane starting in 1967 to take spectra of the sun, stars and planets at infrared wavelengths blocked by the atmosphere of the Earth,” Rieke said.

And UA physicist Frank Low, widely considered the father of infrared astronomy, was among the first to put telescopes in airplanes. In 1968, he mounted a 12-inch scope in the escape hatch of a Lear Jet and used it to confirm, among other things, that energy trapped during the formation of Jupiter was still leaking out of the planet’s core billions of years later, Rieke said.

Those early successes in aerial astronomy prompted the development of NASA’s Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a converted C-141 cargo aircraft fitted with a 36-inch reflecting telescope. It flew for 20 years and helped discover Pluto’s atmosphere, rings around Uranus, and water in comets and in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

When the time came to design Kuiper’s successor, NASA and the German Aerospace Center decided to go even bigger. They took a 747 that once carried passengers for Pan-Am and United Airlines and installed a depressurized compartment with its own outer door to house a 2.5-meter telescope capable of operating at more than 650 mph and altitudes of up to 45,000 feet.

Former UA astronomer Erick Young was appointed science mission operations director for SOFIA in 2009 and served in that role for seven years.

NASA's recently retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy aircraft approaches Davis-Monthan Air Force Base while an A-10 Thunderbolt II waits to take off Tuesday.

The airborne telescope became fully operational in 2014. At the program’s peak, the aircraft and its crew of about 20 people flew several times a week for up to 10 hours at a time.

Marchand said the retired 747 will eventually be displayed outside along with the museum’s other NASA aircraft, including the first Super Guppy used to transport Saturn V rocket parts for the Apollo missions, and a KC-135 “Weightless Wonder V” that made steep dives and climbs to simulate low-gravity conditions for science experiments and astronaut training.

Eventually, the museum hopes to host limited, guided tours inside of SOFIA on open house days a few times a month. When the time comes, those events will be publicized on the museum’s social media pages, Marchand said.

NASA has said it will support the exhibition of the SOFIA aircraft with additional mission artifacts that speak to its legacy.

The Pima Air & Space Museum houses one of the largest aerospace collections in the world, with more than 400 aircraft, six hangars and 80 acres of outdoor displays.

Before SOFIA, the museum’s last large acquisition was a Boeing 777 that was added to the collection in December 2019.

At the moment, Marchand said, there is only one aircraft on the property that’s bigger than NASA’s flying telescope.

“Until we get a C-5 Galaxy over here, (SOFIA) will be a solid No. 2,” behind the slightly larger 747-100 the museum added about four years ago, he said.

NASA's newly retired airborne telescope is headed to the Pima Air & Space Museum for retirement.

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Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@tucson.com or 573-4283. On Twitter: @RefriedBrean