NASA to Study Ultraviolet Sources in Space Through UVEX Survey

NASA has scheduled its next Astrophysics Medium-Class Explorer mission, focusing on an all-sky survey, for 2030.

The UltraViolet EXplorer space telescope will study sources of ultraviolet light in the universe and identify explosions that follow bursts of gravitational waves caused by merging neutron stars. UVEX will also carry an ultraviolet spectrograph to study stellar explosions and large stars.

Data gathered by UVEX will complement those collected by the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope slated for launch in 2027 and other missions within the 2020 decade, NASA said Tuesday.

The ultraviolet survey is one of the space agency’s space exploration missions focused on different areas of study.

In December, NASA transmitted a high-definition video to and from the Psyche spacecraft some 19 million miles away as part of the Deep Space Optical Communications experiment. Scientists used lasers to send the video to a transceiver installed on Psyche and sent data back from the spacecraft to the Hale Telescope in less than two minutes.

NASA launched Psyche in October to reach a metal-rich asteroid located 2.2 billion miles away in a bid to explore the Earth’s origin and test the DSOC concept.