During the FISA2004 project, high-precision measurements of the absolute total fission cross section were performed using the advantage of the inverse-kinematics method at the GSI accelerator facility. High-intensity heavy-ion beams at energies between 100 A MeV and 1500 A MeV were provided by the heavy-ion synchrotron SIS.

In this project the spallation-fission of ²⁰⁸Pb and ²³⁸U in proton and deuterium targets in the energy regime from 500 A MeV to 1 A GeV was studied. An experimental set-up especially designed for fission studies in inverse kinematics was used. It allowed us to improve the accuracy of the total fission cross section from 30 – 40 % to less than 10 %, to renormalize already measured data, and to study the energy and mass dependence of the spallation-fission process. The energy dependence is very important due to the energy loss of the proton beam in the spallation neutron source and due to the importance of secondary reactions initiated by particles emitted in the primary reactions. In addition, these data helped also to benchmark the models.