Contents: 1) FUSE Mission Status 2) Change in NASA Grants Administration 3) U-program Listing Available on-line 4) New e-mail SPAM filter activated at Johns Hopkins 5) Reminder: FUSE Based PhD Theses 1) FUSE Mission Status As of this writing, FUSE continues to perform very well in the one-reaction-wheel mode. Operations have improved dramatically since the end of 2005, and both planning and scheduling software and the Attitude Control System software on the satellite have undergone continual improvements. In April 2006, the last month with complete statistics, we gathered over 700 ksec of science data and were guiding for 31.8% of the time, comparable to the mission-averaged scheduling efficiency! Operations so far in May 2006 have been even better than in April. We are very encouraged. We have recently taken a careful look at the FUSE effective area, and the news is very good. The sensitivity in the LiF channels has barely changed over the last year and a half. The SiC channels have continued the slow decline seen earlier in the mission, but the change is less than our interim estimates had indicated. All of this is to say that the FUSE science instrument remains in excellent shape for continued operations! You can always access the latest FUSE Mission Status Report on the web: 2) Change in NASA Grants Administration NASA has transferred the processing and award of all grants across the Agency to the NASA Shared Services Center (NSSC) at Stennis Space Center. Effective May 2006, all new grants submitted for award will be handled by the NSSC. The grants office at Goddard Space Flight Center will continue handle all grants that they previously issued, or that were submitted to them by the Technical Officer for award before May 1, 2006. There are still a small number of new FUSE grants in the processing pipeline at Goddard that have yet to be awarded. Requests for no cost extensions or other administrative actions should be addressed to the appropriate office that issued the grant. Please consult the list of Points of Contract in the Research Grant award document sent to office of sponsored programs at your institution. Eventually, all grant communications will be with the NSSC, but this will take a few years until all of the Goddard grants are closed. The FUSE Project Scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center will continue to be the Technical Officer for all FUSE grants. 3) U-program Listing Available on-line With the need for momentum and torque authority management in planning the FUSE time line, it is important that Mission Planning (MP) has a well populated target database over the available sky. In order to achieve this we have taken a subset of previously observed targets and generated the so called "U-programs". These are observations of a nominal time request of 8 ksec used by MP to fill in a schedule when regular program targets are not available, given the scheduling constraints. The length of the actually scheduled observation is fully at the discretion of MP and can in some cases be quite substantial. U-program observations become publicly available immediately (consistent with any quality control issues that may need to be resolved) and so should be of considerable interest to many in the FUSE community. In order to make it easier for you to find U-program observations of interest to you, we have posted two listings of the targets on the FUSE web site. The page contains a listing ordered by FUSE target ID. This list provides: target ID, target name, object class, R.A. (2000), Dec. (2000), Observation date (for observed targets) and the actual exposure time. The page provides most of the same information (but no observation log data), but ordered by the "Object class" (which are listed, for instance, at We will endeavor to update the observation log data on these pages about once a month, but any archived data can be obtained from MAST at any time. 4) New e-mail SPAM filter activated at Johns Hopkins Please note that the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University recently activated a new anti-SPAM filter on the machines used for FUSE e-mail (both individual FUSE staff and project accounts, such as fuse_support@pha.jhu.edu). While we have so far seen very few false positives (i.e. legitimate e-mails being flagged as SPAM), if you were to send us e-mail without receiving a reply within a reasonable amount of time, please contact us via telephone to verify that your e-mail did indeed arrive past the anti-SPAM filtering. 5) Reminder: FUSE Based PhD Theses We'd like to remind you that the FUSE project maintains a web page listing all Ph.D. theses that have used or been supported by FUSE data and grants. When available, we also provide links either to an on-line summary of the thesis work or to the thesis itself. We also list theses that are still in development. Please see: If you or your students know of Ph.D. theses using FUSE data, please submit the relevant information to the FUSE Webmaster account at: fuseweb@pha.jhu.edu Please include Full Title, Full name of the Ph.D. recipient, granting institution, month and year of degree (or when expected), and any links to on-line information. See the web page for examples.
The Observer's Electronic Newsletter is published 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 the 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 Program Manager at JHU is Mr. Randy Ewing, and the NASA Project Scientist for FUSE is Dr. George Sonneborn.