Mission Status Report #113      Star Date: May 21, 2008

FUSE Close-out Proceeds

(Click image above to see larger version.)

As discussed in an earlier status report, the FUSE satellite has terminated operations and has entered the close-out phase of the project. The satellite was decommissioned on October 18, 2007. FUSE will be up there orbiting quietly for a long time (30 years or more by some estimates) until ultimately it will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

FUSE close-out activities are proceeding on schedule. It is not exciting work, but it is important work nonetheless. The reprocessing of the entire FUSE science data set is now more than 85% complete, and should be done by late-June or early July 2008. Final reports are being assembled for delivery to NASA, and documentation and archiving of procedures are in progress. The satellite control center is partially dismantled, and should be completely gone by mid-summer. It takes a lot of work to close out a satellite project.

In the mean time, science results continue to come out even though new observations are no longer being obtained. Just today, a major release came out reporting combined work with FUSE and the Hubble Space Telescope that has identified roughly half of the so-called "missing matter" in the local universe! There is a huge amount of FUSE data still to be mined, and we expect new publications to be coming out for at least several more years.

The other news is that, as noted at the top of this page, there will be a FUSE end-of-mission conference this fall! Thanks to the generous support of NASA HQ, this conference will not only allow many new results to be shared with the astronomical community, but will also ask those researchers to "look ahead" toward what a future capability would have to include to extend the kind of science that FUSE has done to the next level. It should be an exciting conference, and will be a fitting capstone on the accomplishments of this marvelous mission. For more information, visit the conference web site.

Reported by: Bill Blair, FUSE Chief of Observatory Operations