NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft

June 28, 2013

J.D. Harrington
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-5241
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

Whitney Clavin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-4673
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov


RELEASE: 13-196

NASA DECOMMISSIONS ITS GALAXY HUNTER SPACECRAFT

WASHINGTON -- 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.

"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


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