Contents: 1) Ground station(s) update 2) Satellite gyros 3) FUSE satellite testing 4) Season's greetings 1) Ground station(s) update The repairs to the main FUSE ground station in Puerto Rico after the hurricane damage, are proceeding well. Retest of the UPRM station is scheduled for early February! The Universal Spacenet station in Hawaii, which FUSE will also use, earlier this month successfully supported the SWAS launch, indicating that it's up and ready to fulfill its FUSE support role as well. 2) Satellite Gyros The vendor for the inertial reference units (IRUs), which contain the gyroscopes, is actively working on the problem which we discussed in last month's newsletter. They believe they have identified and fixed the problem, and testing is underway to demonstrate this. 3) FUSE satellite testing The FUSE satellite has been undergoing extensive testing in the thermal-vacuum chamber at Goddard for several weeks now. As part of this, an optical end-to-end test was started on November 28 and ran through December 4. The purpose of the test was to exercise techniques for aligning and focusing the instrument on-orbit, and to see how the full instrument responds to a UV light source. The co-alignment and focus procedures worked very well. The data indicate that the spectral resolution is about what we expected. The telescope image size is harder to interpret because we don't have an independent measure of the collimator source imaging quality at FUV wavelengths. So while the error bars are fairly large, the telescope mirrors appear to be performing at close to their specified quality. One important problem was discovered during these tests. The structure was found to distort more than predicted as its temperature changes. This is thought to be due to four bars running the length of the spectrograph which warp the grating bench as they expand or contract with temperature. A design fix has been identified which should eliminate the warping and the resulting focus and spectral location changes. Once some new parts are fabricated, the modification will take less than a day to complete. This will be followed by another optical end-to-end test to verify that the problem has been solved. Aa usual, test reports can be found at: 4) Season's Greetings from the FUSE project Finally, let me pass on very warm season's greetings from all of us here at the FUSE project, with wishes for a prosperous and data filled new year! PS. Please come by and see us at the FUSE booth during the Austin AAS meeting! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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