Donald Savage

Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

September 16, 1994

(Phone: 202/358-1547)

RELEASE: 94-155

NASA BEGINS RESTRUCTURING EXPLORER PROGRAM AND FUSE

MISSION

NASA's Explorer program and the Far Ultraviolet

Spectroscopic Explorer mission will be restructured to enable
funding for more frequent, smaller Explorer missions.

"As part of the restructuring effort, we made a difficult

decision not to fly the Far Ultraviolet Spectrocopic Explorer
(FUSE) mission as it is currently baselined, but to redesign it
and bring down its cost," Dr. Wesley T. Huntress Jr., NASA's
Associate Administrator of Space Science, said at a meeting of
the Space Science Advisory Committee held this week in
Washington, D.C. Huntress asked the committee to provide
guidance and suggestions to NASA on restructuring the Explorer
program.

Huntress said the restructuring was due to a lack of funds

to start new Explorer missions before the year 2000, when FUSE
was to launch. In 1990, when two Delta-class Explorer missions
were approved for definition studies, including FUSE, the agency
anticipated a growing space science budget throughout this
decade, he said. The plans at that time called both for
relatively expensive high-priority missions such as FUSE and
other new missions to be started in the late 1990s.

The assumptions for a growing budget changed shortly

afterwards, however, and the agency now anticipates a relatively
flat space science budget for the foreseeable future. Several
space science missions underwent extensive restructuring efforts,
successfully bringing down costs while preserving critical
science. Huntress said the agency also would have to
restructure the Explorer program to meet the astrophysics and
space physics communities' desire for more frequent mission
opportunities.
 "By restructuring the Explorer program we can start a new
program of medium explorers (MIDEX) with a one-per-year flight
rate much sooner than we had planned, beginning with an
announcement of opportunity next year," Huntress continued. "The
tremendous amount of science we would gain with this approach by
flying more frequent missions makes a great deal of sense for the
entire space science program."

Over the next three months, the FUSE Principal

Investigator, Warren Moos of the Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore, will review options to restructure FUSE from a
Delta-class mission into a smaller, less expensive MIDEX mission
and present a proposal to NASA.

The FUSE mission was designed to study the origin and

evolution of the lightest elements -- hydrogen and deuterium --
created shortly after the Big Bang, and the forces and processes
involved in the evolution of galaxies, stars and planetary
systems. The far ultraviolet region of the spectrum can
only be observed outside the Earth's atmosphere.

The Explorer program is managed by the Explorer Project

Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., for
the Office of Space Science in Washington, D.C.

- end -

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