Showing posts with label GALEX. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GALEX. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
GALEX Space Telescope Turned Off After Decade Of Galaxy Spotting, NASA Says
NASA has turned off a decade-old space telescope, a year after loaning the orbiting instrument to a university that operated it with private funding.
The space agency decommissioned its Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft, or GALEX, on Friday afternoon (June 28), NASA officials said. During its 10-year career, GALEX peered at hundreds of millions of galaxies, helping researchers better understand how these huge collections of stars grow and evolve.
"GALEX is a remarkable accomplishment," Jeff Hayes, NASA's GALEX program executive in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "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."
The $150 million GALEX satellite launched in April 2003 on a 29-month mission to study the history of star formation in the universe.
NASA extended GALEX but eventually stopped funding it in February 2011. . . .
