Talk about boldly going where no one has gone before: Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on the original Star Trek TV series, announced recently that she would be involved in an upcoming NASA mission to study the atmosphere and analyze comets.
According to People magazine, the 82-year-old actress, who is recovering from a minor stroke she suffered back in June, revealed during a Reddit AMA on Friday that she would be among the passengers on a NASA Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) airborne observatory flight when it lifts off on September 15.
“SOFIA does not, sadly, fly into space,” she explained. “It’s… a massive telescope mounted inside a [Boeing] 747 flying as high as is possible. I was on a similar flight, the first airborne observatory, back in 1977. It’s an amazing experience, you get a totally different perspective than from Earth. I do hope someone gets some great pictures.”
Not quite the Enterprise… but pretty cool!
Nichols will be “among the first non-essential personnel” to experience SOFIA, which is a joint project of the US space agency and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), The Verge reported on Monday. It was developed to observe infrared energy in the universe, allowing it to study things such as black holes, solar systems, asteroids, and newborn stars.
In fact, SOFIA was able to observe Pluto as the dwarf planet passed in front of a star during a recent flight near New Zealand. The instrument is more than eight feet in diameter and is housed in the aircraft’s fuselage. It has been hailed as the world’s largest airborne observatory, and is planned to have a lifespan of approximately two decades.
During that recent deployment to New Zealand, which lasted from June 15 through July 24, the flying observatory studied portions of the universe that can only be viewed from the Southern Hemisphere, NASA said. During that time, it was stationed at the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program facility at Christchurch International Airport.
SOFIA Program Manager Eddie Zavala said that the six-week mission was “hugely successful,” adding, “the quality of the astronomical observing conditions in that part of the world is truly exceptional. I expect that there will be numerous science publications once the data have been processed and analyzed.”
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