FAME is an astrometric satellite designed to determine, with unprecedented accuracy, the positions, distances, and proper motions of 40 million stars within 6,500 light years of the Sun. The value of the Lockheed Martin contract for FAME is $37 million.

The ATC is part of a team headed by the U.S. Naval Observatory -- and including the Naval Research Laboratory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory -- that submitted a proposal to NASA to build and fly the FAME mission.

"We're delighted to be a part of the U.S. Naval Observatory FAME team, and we look forward to beginning work with our FAME colleagues to get this mission into space," said Dr. Richard Vassar, Lockheed Martin FAME program manger at the ATC in Palo Alto.

Lockheed Martin will provide the complete optical instrument including an optical telescope, a high-resolution, 24-CCD focal plane, a thermally stable optical bench, and focal plane readout electronics. The unique design of the instrument allows it to meet the requirement to determine a star's position to 1/350 of a CCD pixel.

The instrument will have no moving parts and will incorporate special algorithms for extracting science data from the CCDs and transmitting it to the ground for analysis.

The Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer (FAME), a space telescope designed to obtain highly precise position and brightness measurements of 40 million stars. It will allow astronomers to accurately measure the distance to stars within the Milky Way galaxy and to substantially improve our knowledge of the distance scale of the universe.

It will enable the detection of large planets and planetary systems around stars within 1,000 light years of the Sun, and provide the means to measure the amount of dark matter in the galaxy from its influence on stellar motions. This 30-fold improvement in accuracy over previous position-measuring spacecraft will establish a new standard for measuring distances in astronomy and help resolve questions about the size and age of the universe.

FAME's innovative design incorporates a solar sail to utilize the pressure from sunlight to change the orientation of the spacecraft in order to scan the entire sky. The FAME telescope looks in two directions at once to achieve its high accuracy. It rotates with a period of 40 minutes.

The FAME team is lead by Dr. Kenneth J. Johnston, the Scientific Director of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.

The FAME project is a collaborative effort of the U.S. Naval Observatory, the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC), Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space Advanced Technology Center (Palo Alto, CA), and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (Cambridge, MA). The FAME project has a total mission cost to NASA of $162 million, with additional support provided by the Navy to extend the duration of the operation of the FAME satellite.

The Explorer program, run by NASA's Office of Space Science and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD), provides frequent opportunities for scientific investigations from space at relatively low cost. FAME is a medium-class Explorer (MIDEX), which are the largest of the Explorer program missions.

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