NASA Decides to Halt FAME Mission

NASA has decided not to continue funding the Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer (FAME) mission into Phase C. Apparently there was not enough confidence on NASA’s part that the mission could achieve the astrometric accuracy it had advertised. It is important to note that FAME had DoD backing for an extended mission (a second 5 year phase of observations).

FAME is a collaborative effort between the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) and several other institutions. FAME was selected by NASA as a MIDEX mission in 1999 and was scheduled to be launched in 2004. FAME would have measured stellar positions of more than 40 million stars to an accuracy of less than 50 microarcseconds. These observations would have been used for a variety of research activities – including the detection of jovian class planets around some of the stars closest to Earth.

The folks from USNO were understandably unhappy about this – but managed to retain a sense of humor. If you walked by their exhibit at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington yesterday, there was a hat sitting on their table and people were tossing money into it.