NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft

PRESS RELEASE
June 28, 2013, 4:09 p.m. ET


WASHINGTON, June 28, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/


-- NASA has turned off its Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) after a decade of

operations in which the venerable space telescope used its ultraviolet vision to study

hundreds of millions of galaxies across 10 billion years of cosmic time.




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"GALEX is a remarkable accomplishment," said Jeff Hayes, NASA's GALEX program

executive in Washington. "This small Explorer mission has mapped and studied galaxies

in the ultraviolet, light we cannot see with our own eyes, across most of the sky."




Operators at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va., sent the signal to decommission

GALEX at 3:09 p.m. EDT Friday, June 28. The spacecraft will remain in orbit for at least

65 years, then fall to Earth and burn up re-entering the atmosphere. GALEX met its

prime objectives and its mission was extended three times before NASA decided to end it.




Highlights from the mission's decade of sky scans include: -- The discovery of a gargantuan comet-like tail behind a speeding star called Mira. -- Catching a black hole "red-handed" as it munched on a star. -- Finding giant rings of new stars around old, dead galaxies. -- Independently confirming the nature of dark energy. -- The discovery of a missing link in galaxy evolution -- the teenage galaxies transitioning from young to old.




The mission also captured a dazzling collection of snapshots, showing everything from

ghostly nebulas to a spiral galaxy with huge, spidery arms.




In a first-of-a-kind move for NASA, the agency in May 2012 loaned GALEX to Caltech,

which used private funds to continue operating the satellite while NASA retained ownership.

Since then, investigators from around the world have used GALEX to study everything

from stars in our own Milky Way galaxy to hundreds of thousands of galaxies 5 billion

light-years away.




In the space telescope's last year, it scanned across large patches of sky, including the

bustling, bright center of our Milky Way. The telescope spent time staring at some areas

of the sky exploded stars, called supernovae, and monitoring how objects, such as the

centers of active galaxies, change over time. GALEX also scanned the sky for massive,

feeding black holes and shock waves from early supernova explosions.




Data from the last year of the mission will be made public in the coming year.




"GALEX, the mission, may be over, but its science discoveries will keep on going," said

Kerry Erickson, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

in Pasadena, Calif.




A slideshow showing some of the popular GALEX images can be seen here:

http://go.nasa.gov/17xAVDd

JPL managed the GALEX mission and built the science instrument. The mission's principal

investigator, Chris Martin, is at Caltech. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,

Md., developed the mission under the Explorers Program it manages. Researchers sponsored

by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in

France collaborated on the mission.




Graphics and additional information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer are online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/galex

SOURCE NASA

/Web site: http://www.nasa.gov







From: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130628-909911.html