Title: SOFIA first trans-Atlantic flight
Designer: Unknown; submitted by Paul Aristo
Year it was designed: 2011
Explanation or story behind the patch: It was designed for the first time SOFIA went to Germany for the German Aerospace Day in 2011. Nick Veronico/ARC led the work on the patch. This patch was flown on the first trans-Atlantic flight of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which took place on the night of Sept. 15/16, 2011. The flight departed from the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility (DAOF, now Hangar 703) in Palmdale, CA, and landed at the Cologne/Bonn Airport, home of the German Aerospace Agency. During this flight, science was collected by the German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies (GREAT), a spectrometer developed by a team from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany. The patch depicts SOFIA above a stylized map of the event, surrounded by flags of the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany.