Just 100 minutes after NASA launched the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) in late June, the space agency handed the mission to Johns Hopkins scientists, as part of NASA's intent to improve mission operations. The project is one of several NASA now at the Baltimore-area university.
"To all modern astronomy departments, particularly to a department like ours, NASA is critical," said Dr. Bengt-Goran Andersson, who works on the three-year, $204 million FUSE project that was conceived and developed primarily by Johns Hopkins scientists.
It is designed to study space for deuterium, a different form of hydrogen, as a way of confirming or discounting the big bang theory.
In 1991, Johns Hopkins faculty submitted a proposal to NASA for the FUSE project, promising to do the project for less if they had more control.
"We basically reduced the cost by about half," said Dr. Harold Weaver, who also works on the project.
Now, the Applied Physics Laboratory, which is a university-affiliated research department, has two major projects. The first is the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.
The rendezvous with the Eros asteroid was delayed a year after the probes first major rocket firing failed, but the spacecraft saved itself and will meet up with the asteroid in February 2000.
NASA first estimated the mission to cost $400 million, according to NEAR Project Manager Thomas Coughlin. But after the APL took over, it was launched for a cost of $114 million.
"That helped verify the faster, better, cheaper thinking," Coughlin said.
APL is also working on a project named MESSENGER, which will be part of the Discovery Program. The laboratory will manage a mission to Mercury to find out why the planet is so dense and chart the characteristics of its atmosphere.
The program will cost $286 million and will launch in 2004. By 2008, the spacecraft will fly near the planet twice and in 2009 it will conduct detailed scientific studies.
In all, Coughlin estimates that APL gets $100 million a year from NASA to create and manage space projects. "NASA is the largest part of our budget," he said, and added that working with the space agency helps to recruit the brightest talent.
Still, Coughlin is concerned of the possible $1 billion budget cuts being debated currently in the House. Calling it the most significant cut he's ever seen, he said that any program in its early stages, like MESSENGER, could be threatened by the reductions.
Scientists in the university's physics and astronomy department are set to install a new camera on the Hubble Space Telescope in a year and a half, said James Crocker, who is formerly of Johns Hopkins and now works for Ball Aerospace.
The 8-meter camera will replace the 2.4-meter camera now in use on the telescope. It will be ten times more powerful, cover more of the sky and will develop and send the pictures hours faster than before.
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