The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) spacecraft aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket, lifted off at 11:44 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla. Approximately 76 minutes after launch, the spacecraft separated from the Delta II second stage.
"We're off to a great start," said David Mengers, FUSE mission manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "The satellite is now in orbit, the solar arrays have deployed and all data indicates we have a healthy satellite.
At the satellite control center at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore the satellite was monitored with communications through ground stations at Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Deep Space Network, and Tracking and Data Relay Satellites at launch.
"Over the next couple weeks The Johns Hopkins University FUSE team will checkout the spacecraft, perform calibration activities and conduct a detailed checkout of the scientific instrument," said Dennis McCarthy, FUSE project manager at The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins developed FUSE for NASA.
The 3,000 pound (1,360 kilograms) satellite is currently in a circular orbit 477 miles (768 kilometers) above the Earth and will orbit about every 100 minutes.
The satellite must operate on its own most of the time, moving from target to target, identifying star fields, centering objects in the spectrograph apertures and performing the observations. A ground station located in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico will be in sight of the satellite about seven times a day for 10 minutes at a time. A commercial ground station in Hawaii also will be used to downlink data. The data is then transferred to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The FUSE mission and science control centers are located on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus in Baltimore.
FUSE is a telescope designed for very specialized and unique tasks that are complementary to other NASA missions. The spacecraft will look at light in the far ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with much greater sensitivity and resolution than previous instruments. No other current telescopes can observe this important spectral region.
The FUSE satellite consists of two sections: the spacecraft platform and the science instrument. The spacecraft developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation, contains all the elements necessary for powering and controlling the satellite including the attitude control system, command and data handling, solar panels, batteries, and communications electronics and antennas.
The observatory, one of NASA's Explorer satellites, was developed by the Johns Hopkins, in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency, the French Space Agency (CNES), University of Colorado, University of California-Berkeley, Orbital Sciences Corp., Swales Aerospace, Applied Physics Laboratory, Interface and Controls Systems Inc. and AlliedSignal Technical Services Corp.
The Goddard Center manages FUSE, one of the first missions in NASA's Origins program, for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. FUSE is the first NASA mission of this scope that has been developed and operated entirely by a university.