After a bumpy start, a Johns Hopkins-based orbiting observatory has begun to send back important new findings on the life cycles of stars and galaxies.
Scientists working with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite told astronomers meeting in Atlanta yesterday they have found clouds of hot gas surrounding our Milky Way galaxy, blown there by the explosions of dying stars.
FUSE has also given astronomers their first look at the vast, wispy clouds of cold molecular hydrogen -- the raw material for new stars -- long-supposed to float throughout the Milky Way.
"The FUSE observatory is now open for routine business," said Hopkins physics professor H. Warren Moos, principal FUSE investigator. He is presiding this week over the presentation of 25 papers by FUSE scientists to the American Astronomical Society.
To Moos and his team, the papers are vindication for FUSE after an orbital check-out period bedeviled by technical problems. Most of them have now been resolved, or managed, Moos said.
"We're still tuning the satellite to get the best resolution and the highest sensitivity," he said. But FUSE is breaking new ground now. "This is good stuff," he said.
The $108 million FUSE observatory was designed and built at Hopkins, and is operated 24 hours a day from a control center on the Homewood campus in Baltimore.
FUSE was built to give astronomers a view of the universe in a largely untapped part of the ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
It does not take pictures, but breaks down ultraviolet light to reveal the chemistry and physics of the stars and galaxies, or the dust and gas through which their light has passed.
FUSE was launched in June to an orbit 477 miles high. But a series of problems delayed routine science operations by two months.
The mission's ground station in Puerto Rico broke down repeatedly, and radiation unexpectedly knocked out data in the spacecraft's computer when FUSE flew over the South Atlantic region where Earth's radiation belts dip low into its orbital path.
The FUSE team also found tiny but important misalignments of the spacecraft's four mirrors caused by solar heating of the telescope.
Engineers have fixed, or learned to work around, the problems, and "we're getting better at it," Moos said.
