The use of radioactive beams in inverse kinematics has allowed for a dramatic increase in the number of fissioning nuclei which could be investigated at rather low excitation energies and angular momenta, thereby providing information on the influence of nuclear structure on fission. Experimental progress, however, has been mostly limited to neutron deficient radioactive nuclei.

A brief overview of available experimental approaches and highlights of obtained results will be presented, namely the use of radioactive beams at relativistic energies, the use of storage rings, and the use of multi-nucleon transfer reactions. This motivates an experiment to study fission with a fourth approach at the ISOLDE Solenoidal Spectrometer with a novel suite of detectors.

Nuclear fission is a well-studied process but, due to its complexity, unexpected observations continue to puzzle. The role of fission for the astrophysical r-process will be discussed.