POSTER P204: SOFIA/GREAT: inflight operations

Theme: Ground and space mission operations software

pretalxeposter

GREAT was a heterodyne receiver that flew on board the SOFIA observatory from early science flights in 2011 until the close of the mission in 2022. GREAT was a PI led instrument that observed at frequencies ranging from 480 to 4700 GHz. In this talk I will discuss the in-flight instrument operation, how observations were undertaken, how the receiver was tuned, how the data quality was monitored and processed in-flight. Unique to the airborne observatory was the system was offline with no internet connection allowed due to IT security reason, I will discuss some of the peculiarities of this setup and how we maintained an up to-date system on the aircraft.