For the past year a Joint Working Group of NASA and ESA scientists and engineers has been defining the scientific objectives and instrument parameters for a proposed satellite to obtain far and extreme ultraviolet spectra of stars, interstellar gas, solar system objects, and galaxies. The project, now called Columbus, incorporates the scientific goals of the previously proposed NASA Far Ultraviolet Spectrograph Explorer (FUSE) and ESA Magellan missions.

The prime spectral range of Columbus, 900–1200 Å, cannot be observed by IUE or Space Telescope. In this spectral range Copernicus was able to observe bright stars (mv ≤ 6) with high resolution and the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) will observe faint sources at low resolution, but Columbus will be the first instrument capable of high spectral resolution observations of faint sources (mv ≈ 17). High resolution spectra in the 900–1200 Å region will permit studies of the Lyman lines of atomic H and D, the molecules H2 and HD, resonance lines of C III and O VI, and other species listed in Table 1. Columbus also is being designed to observe the 1200–2000 Å spectral region at high resolution, permitting measurements of many stages of ionization for the same atom (i.e. N I, II, III, V; C II, III, IV; and S II, III, IV, VI). The broad coverage of ionization states is essential for the analysis of interstellar and stellar plasmas where the ionization balance can be quite complex.