NASA Pulls Plug on 8-Year FUSE Satellite

Photo is not real, it's superimposed into a galaxy. The thing will be up there 30 years floating around, then, what happens? Article doesn't say, it ends up "hot metal" falling through the roofs of your cars, I guess. The solar panels will still be working and the satellite won't know what to do. Also, good to know that a Hubble 2008 upgrade is in the works.

The satellite, known as FUSE, became inoperable in July when it lost its ability to point accurately and steadily at areas of interest.

"For all intents and purposes, FUSE is dead," said Bill Blair, FUSE chief of observatory operations, on the satellite's Web site, adding that it will take years for astronomers to comb through the mountain of data generated by the mission.

FUSE's achievements:

* Showing that enough water has escaped from Mars to form a vast ocean 100-feet deep,
* Discovering far more deuterium, a form of hydrogen, in the Milky Way galaxy than astronomers had expected,
* Detecting an atmosphere of very hot gas surrounding the Milky Way,
* Showing that about 10 percent of matter in the local universe consists of million-degree gas floating between the galaxies.

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