FUSE News Number 45 -- January 23, 2008
1) FUSE Science Conference Planned for Fall 2008
2) FUSE Close-out Status
3) New Resource for Magellanic Cloud Researchers
1) FUSE Science Conference Planned for Fall 2008
The rumors are true! There will be an End-of-Mission FUSE science
conference sponsored by NASA Headquarters. The goal of the conference
is to review accomplishments of the FUSE mission and explore their
implications for future astronomical missions. We are looking at Fall
2008 dates, and a venue possibly in Annapolis, Maryland. We expect the
conference to last 2-1/2 days and include both invited talks and
posters. The FUSE Observers Advisory Committee will form the core of
the scientific organizing committee for the conference. Further details
will be circulated as soon as they become available, so stay tuned.
2) FUSE Close-out Status
On-orbit activities concluded in mid-October 2007 with the
decommissioning of the satellite. However, many project close-out
activities continue at JHU, and good progress is being made.
The lion's share of effort this fall has been on pulling together a
final technical report. This is being given first priority, while the
control center and engineering archive are still available on-line and
control center staff are still available. Reprocessing of the entire
FUSE science data set using CalFUSE 3.2 is also progressing smoothly,
with over 70% of the data already re-delivered to MAST.
This winter/spring, the effort will shift toward the creation of a new
archival web presence for the project at MAST. Support and
documentation for archival researchers will dominate this development,
but transfer and archiving of relevant materials from the current web
site will be an important element as well.
We will continue to post occasional updates on the FUSE home page:
http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu/
3) New Resource for Magellanic Cloud Researchers
A new FUSE-related High Level Science Product site has just become
available at MAST. The "FUSE Magellanic Clouds Legacy Project" has
reprocessed nearly 500 FUSE stellar data sets on nearly 300 separate
sight lines, and this new web interface makes these data available for
quick look assessments in a standardized format. Any targets with
multiple observations have already been aligned and summed for the user,
providing the best S/N data for each sight line.
Data for numerous ISM lines are shown on an aligned velocity scale for
each target. Also, overviews of both the O VI spectral region (1028 -
1042 A) and the entire FUSE spectral range (binned) are shown as well.
In addition to the FUSE data, optical and IR context images of the 20
arcmin region centered on each sight line are also provided for each
target. This allows the user to correlate the ISM lines with the
gaseous and dust components on the sight line with convenient "one stop
shopping." The site provides MC researchers with a convenient way to
inspect this large data set, finding the subset of FUSE data that are of
most interest to their particular science program. The relevant data
sets can then be downloaded via the normal MAST interface.
The FUSE MC Legacy Project site is available at the following link:
http://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/fuse_mc/
This project was funded through a Cycle 5 FUSE grant NNG05GE03G to JHU.
The Observer's Electronic Newsletter is published by the FUSE project and is aimed at the FUSE user community.
Editor for this issue: Bill Blair
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.