NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
alan.d.buis@jpl.nasa.gov

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

News Release: 2013-211 June 28, 2013

NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-211&cid=release_2013-211

PASADENA, Calif. -- 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
12:09 p.m. PDT (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 upon re-entering the atmosphere. GALEX met its prime objectives and the
mission was extended three times before being cancelled.

Highlights from the mission's decade of sky scans include:

-- Discovering 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.
-- Discovering 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 the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, 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 certain areas of the sky, finding
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.

"In the last few years, GALEX studied objects we never thought we'd be able to observe, from the
Magellanic Clouds to bright nebulae and supernova remnants in the galactic plane," said David
Schiminovich of Columbia University, N.Y., N.Y, a longtime GALEX team member who led science
operations over the past year. "Some of its most beautiful and scientifically compelling images are
part of this last observation cycle."

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 in Pasadena, Calif.

A slideshow showing some of the popular GALEX images is online at: 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. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Graphics and additional information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer are online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/galex

-end-

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