Less redundancy and less access to ongoing engineering support were consistent with NASA policy for missions in their extended phase, where a higher level of risk is allowed.

The spacecraft contains all of the elements necessary for powering and pointing the satellite, including the Attitude Control System, the solar panels, and communications-electronics and antennas.

[3] The FUSE science instrument consists of four co-aligned telescope mirrors (~39 × 35 cm (15 × 14 in) clear aperture) based on a Rowland circle design.

The light from the four optical channels is dispersed by four spherical, aberration-corrected holographic diffraction gratings, and recorded by two delay-line microchannel plate detectors.

[3] Each mirror has a corresponding astigmatism-corrected, holographically-ruled diffraction grating, each one on a curved substrate so as to produce four 1.65 m (5 ft 5 in) Rowland circle spectrographs.

[4] FUSE Science Operations were on hold from 10 December 2001, to approximately the end of January 2002, due to a problem with the pointing system.

Although the telescope itself remained in excellent condition, the satellite was incapable thereafter of the fine pointing control required to acquire useful science data, and the mission was terminated.

Because of the large number of atomic absorption and emission lines in the far-ultraviolet, FUSE enabled many studies of galactic, extragalactic, and intergalactic chemistry and chemical evolution.

Canada credits work on the FUSE as helping them prepare for making the fine guidance sensors instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope.