A $9 million instrument designed and built at the 乐播传媒 at Boulder for a new NASA satellite is now set for launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 23.
The $100 million Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission, or FUSE, will study the far UV light emanating from distant stars, galaxies, quasars and interstellar gas and dust, said James Green, principal investigator on the project and a professor at CU-Boulder聮s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. CASA is an astronomy center located in CU-Boulder聮s College of Arts and Sciences.
"The rocket is on the pad and we are extremely confident in our instrument," said Green. "I think the whole CU team feels really good about this mission."
The FUSE mission is being managed by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as part of NASA's Explorer program. Directed by Warren Moos, chair of the Johns Hopkins department of physics and astronomy, the international FUSE mission involves scientists from the United States, France and Canada.
"We finished our spectrograph under budget and on schedule," said John Andrews, CU-Boulder聮s mission manager on the project and CASA research associate. The first three weeks of the mission will involve deploying the solar panels and checking out the various spacecraft systems, he said.
Four telescopes on board the spacecraft will collect and funnel UV light into the spectrograph, which breaks down light like sunbeams passing through a prism, Andrews said. The spectrograph is expected to provide new information on distant space objects, including their temperatures, densities and chemical compositions.
While the far UV region of the electromagnetic spectrum can only be observed outside Earth's atmosphere, FUSE will cover wavelengths not observable with the Hubble Space Telescope.
The FUSE spacecraft -- the first long-term mission to study far UV radiation since the Copernicus satellite 25 years ago -- will be able to view light from sources up to three billion light-years distant, about one million times farther away than the Copernicus.
After three weeks, the instrument will be turned on for the science verification process, said Green. The spacecraft will point at bright nearby stars already studied by scientists to confirm the instrument is working well. Following instrument verification, the spacecraft will begin pointing at several predetermined targets including quasars, hot stars and cool stars, he said.
During the first year of observation, 60 percent of the observing time is allotted to FUSE instrument team members and 40 percent to guest observers selected by the FUSE scientific observing committee. Guest observer applications for the second year of observations will be due this fall, Green said.
Mission scientists hope to use FUSE to learn more about the evolution of the early universe, the properties of hot gas in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds and supernova explosions, said Green. They also hope to determine the amounts of primordial gases in comets and planetary atmospheres in order to understand the origin and evolution of our own solar system.
By measuring the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium -- a heavy form of hydrogen thought to have been manufactured only during the Big Bang -- scientists hope to better understand star evolution and infer primordial conditions in the universe during its first few million years of existence, he said.
The researchers also will study large clouds of molecular hydrogen in space for clues to ongoing chemical processes in the star-forming regions of galaxies.
The FUSE spectrograph is a progenitor of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a new $40 million spectrograph selected by NASA in August 1997 to be designed by CU-Boulder聮s CASA for the Hubble Space Telescope and built jointly by CU and Ball Aerospace Systems Group of Boulder. It is slated to be installed on Hubble in 2003.
The FUSE spectrograph was assembled at CASA's Astrophysics Research Laboratory in the CU Research Park. The FUSE effort has involved 32 CASA students, faculty and engineers, including eight undergraduates.
CU-Boulder garnered $56 million from NASA and it聮s affiliates in fiscal year 1997-98, setting a new record for the campus.