Launch is set for Thursday for NASA's newest space telescope, designed to search for chemical relics of the Big Bang that scientists believe created the universe some 12 billion years ago. During its three-year mission, FUSE is expected to operate mostly on its own, moving from target to target, identifying star fields and centering objects in its spectrograph. That instrument is designed to break down ultraviolet light into its component colors to reveal the elemental makeup of the universe just moments after it began. Thronson and other FUSE mission participants spoke at a news conference Thursday at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The craft will orbit Earth about every 100 minutes.
Stars use up deuterium when they are born, evolve and finally die in supernova explosions.
Astronomers hope to use FUSE data to figure out how much deuterium is left in the universe so they can work backward to find how much was present just after the Big Bang. Other missions have studied deuterium, but not far beyond our solar system, Sonneborn said. FUSE also will study the interaction between gases between stars, called the interstellar medium, and star formation, Thronson said. He called that relationship one of the universe's great cycles. These are key features of how the cycle works from birth to death.