Contents: 1) Puerto Rico ground station damaged 2) FUSE satellite testing 3) Use of HIRS vs. MDRS slits 4) Phase 2 submissions 1) Puerto Rico Ground station damaged The FUSE ground station in Puerto Rico caught the wrath of hurricane Georges almost straight on. The dish was blown off its mounting and was left hanging by some cables. The full extent of the damage is not yet known. However, while repairs to the Mayaguez station are being pursued several alternative downlink options are being studied. Although the situation is still developing, we do not at this time expect this mishap to have any significant impact on the FUSE schedule or science. We'll keep you posted as more information becomes available. 2) FUSE satellite testing Testing of FUSE is proceeding at GSFC. Vibration and acoustic testing were successfully completed in September. Instrument functional and performance tests are on-going and simulations of mission operations will start next week. We expect thermal vacuum testing to begin about mid-October. 3) Use of HIRS vs. MDRS slits There has been some confusion regarding the expected relative data quality from the HIRS and MDRS slits. As has been pointed out in the FUSE Observer's Guide, the spectroscopic resolving power using the MDRS slit is not all that different from the HIRS slit, while providing a significantly better throughput (98% vs. 67% or almost a factor 1.5 in exposure time savings for a given Signal-to-Noise!) Assuming a MDRS PSF of 0.65" and a pointing jitter of 0.5" we find, by convolving the two, an effective PSF through the MDRS of 0.82" or R=24,000 or dv=12.6km/s, compared to R=30,000 or dv=10km/s for HIRS (note that this example is even more conservative than the Phase 2 Instructions which, based on ray-tracing analysis, predicts R=27,000 or dv=11.2km/s). If your program involves observations of faint targets and the highest possible resolution is not required, we urge you to specify the MDRS aperture on these targets. Also, since the MDRS slit does not require PEAK-UPs (the satellite pointing is expected to be good enough to put your source in the MDRS slit, while not necessarily in the HIRS slit) the use of MDRS is operationally both simpler and "safer" - remember; if a PEAK-UP fails due to incorrect flux estimates, YOU will still be charged for the observation (since FUSE will be observing autonomously, we will not know until after the fact that the target acquisition failed). 4) Phase 2 submissions The diligent GI community has found a few "gotchas" in the phase 2 parser. Specific examples include: -Use of colons (:) in text fields can cause parser errors -Offset star entries (parser returns somewhat confusing error messages) -The "expected_ct_rate" should include all sources of detector signal. -If you enter comments or text anywhere in your template file that are not intended for printing (i.e., outside of the requested text blocks), make sure the lines are commented out (put a pound sign [#] at the beginning of each line) or the parser will crash. Please see the NEW(!) web pages under "Observer's News and FAQs" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Observer's Electronic Newsletter is published Monthly by the FUSE project and is aimed at the FUSE user community. Editor: B-G Andersson, FUSE Guest Investigator Officer. The FUSE Project is managed by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Astrophysical Sciences in Baltimore, MD, for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The FUSE Principal Investigator is Dr. Warren Moos, the FUSE Project Manager at JHU is Mr. Dennis McCarthy, and the NASA Project Scientist for FUSE is Dr. George Sonneborn. Further information about the FUSE Guest Investigator Program can be obtained from: Dr. George Sonneborn; sonneborn@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov ------------------------------------------------------------------------------