At the veterinarian, they do it with an injection. When astronomers want to "put to sleep" one of their pets, they use a mouse click.
Yesterday, astronomers at Johns Hopkins University shut down the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite after 8 years of service. The craft operated 5 years past its planned mission, but repeated and worsening malfunctions in its pointing system rendered FUSE inoperable. In several decades, its orbit will decay and send the 3,000-pound (1,360 kilogram) satellite into a death dive through the atmosphere.
The FUSE control room is in the basement of the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins. The media were invited to visit the control room as project scientists and engineers performed the funeral rites.
One can imagine why Bill Blair, chief of observatory operations for the mission, called the shutdown "a sad and ignominious end." Scientists' work — sometimes virtually their entire careers — get attached to particular spacecraft.
Steve McCandliss, a Johns Hopkins astronomer, worked on FUSE since 1981, when he was still a graduate student. "It's sad — I'm a big loser here," he told a reporter from the Baltimore Sun covering the shutdown.
When, in 1999, a software bug turned the Mars Polar Lander into a rubble-strewn crater on Mars, it was, for mission scientists, like a thoroughbred trainer watching the racehorse he raised from a colt get run over by a truck.
FUSE observed the universe at wavelengths just below the Hubble Space Telescope's sensitivity, filling an important gap. It produced spectra — light fingerprints — not pictures. Spectra inform astronomers about many different processes and materials in the universe, both near and far. We gaze in awe at Hubble's magnificent portraits of deep space, but FUSE was one of the unglamorous but scientifically valuable missions on which NASA built much of its scientific credibility.
FUSE mapped molecular hydrogen in Mars' atmosphere, suggesting the planet may have once had more water in proportion to its size than Earth.
FUSE observations confirmed the existence of a hot-gas halo around our galaxy, and discovered molecular nitrogen outside the solar system.
FUSE collected 131 million seconds of data. Astronomers published more than 1,200 scientific papers based on FUSE data.
The satellite was not a racehorse, but a workhorse. It responded to the last command from Earth at 5:27 P.M. and finally fell silent.