|
Instrument Built by CU Spacebound
By Ann Schrader
Denver Post Medical/Science Writer
February 16, 1998
A $9 million spectrograph that will
probe the secrets of stars, quasars and interstellar gas has been
shipped by the University of Colorado for integration into a fall
NASA mission.
The instrument, designed and built by
CU Boulder faculty and students, is the heart of the $100 million
Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
where the instrument was sent Wednesday, is managing the mission
as part of NASA's Explorer program. It is set for launch in October
by an unmanned rocket from Cape Canaveral.
John Andrews, CU-Boulder's mission manager
on the project, said the spectrograph was built under budget and
on schedule. He noted that "we have a lot of work to do in
supporting an October launch."
Four telescopes on the spacecraft will
gather ultraviolet light, which will be broken down by the spectrograph.
The bits of light are expected to yield new data on the temperatures,
densities and chemical makeup of distant space objects.
FUSE will peer at ultraviolet light
from sources up to 3 billion light years away. The far ultraviolet
light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum only can be observed
outside Earth's atmosphere and FUSE will look at wavelengths that
the Hubble Space Telescope can't.
The hope is that FUSE will allow scientists
to learn more about the universe's early evolution as well as
the properties of hot gas in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds.
Andrews said supernovae, such as the supernova 1987A that has
received publicity this week, and primordial gases in comets and
planetary atmospheres also will be targets.
The FUSE spectrograph is an earlier
version of the $25 million cosmic origins spectrograph, which
CUBoulder and Ball Aerospace Systems Group of Boulder have
been selected to build for the space telescope. It is scheduled
to be installed during 2002.
|
