Flight operations were handled by GSFC for the first three years, and thereafter were transferred to the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.

[2] FAST investigates the plasma physics of auroral phenomena at extremely high time and spatial resolution using the full complement of particle and field instruments.

[1] The FAST mission uses a unique (not a SAMPEX derivative), lightweight, orbit-normal spinner spacecraft developed by the SMEX project.

The spacecraft has body-mounted solar arrays and is spin-stabilized, rotating at 12 rpm with the spin axis normal to the orbit plane ("cartwheel").

[4] The Time-of-flight Energy Angle Mass Spectrograph (TEAMS) instrument is a high-sensitivity mass-resolving spectrometer with an instantaneous 360*8° field of view.

TEAMS selects the incoming ions according to energy per charge (1.2 eV/e to 12 keV/e) by electrostatic deflection in a toroidal section analyzer with subsequent acceleration (up to 25 keV/e) and time of flight (ToF) analysis.

For each individual ion the instruments measures the energy per charge (electrostatic analyzer) the mass per charge (ToF analyzer), the incidence azimuthal angle (given by spacecraft spin; 5.6° or 11.2° resolution), and the incidence polar angle (given by the sectoring in the ToF unit; 22.5° sectors).

Depending on the measurement mode the full energy sweep is performed 32 or 64 times per spin period thus providing a two-dimensional cut through the distribution function in polar angle every 156 ms or 78 ms. One complete three-dimensional ion distribution function is obtained in half a spin period (2.5 seconds).

Burst mode provides data for the four major ion species with the highest time (0.08 ms), angle (16), and energy (48) resolution.

The search coil magnetometer (also boom-mounted) uses a three-axis sensor system that contains laminated permalloy cores, windings and preamplifiers.

An AC magnetic field measurement is provided over the frequency range 10 Hz to 2.5 kHz with a time resolution of 0.1 ms and a frequency-dependent sensitivity between 10^-8 and 10^-10 nT^2/Hz.