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(Gentle background music)

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SOFIA is a telescope inside of an airplane.

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SOFIA is the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.

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It's a 17 ton telescope in the back of a 747.

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Heavily, heavily modified. Some fantastic engineering.

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The reason we want to fly in a 747 at high altitude is

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to get the data that we can't get on the ground at all.

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SOFIA is a joint NASA/DLR mission.

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DLR is our German partners, the German Space Agency,

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and their contribution is the telescope.

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The goal is to learn more about the universe

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by looking back as far as we can to find our origins,

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to find how stars are formed.

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To understand our cosmic origins,

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NASA Astrophysics has three fundamental questions.

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How does the universe work?

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How did we get here? And are we alone?

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And different astrophysics missions will study