NASA’s UVEX Space Telescope Successfully Passes Key Milestone
Agency officials have confirmed NASA’s UVEX (UltraViolet EXplorer) space telescope after completing a technical and programmatic review known as Key Decision Point C, or KDP-C. With the UVEX project passing its KDP-C, the agency commits to a launch by January 2031 and a total lifecycle cost of $590 million.
Originally selected for development in 2024 as a Medium-Class Explorer mission, UVEX will conduct a sensitive survey of ultraviolet light across the entire sky to provide new insights into how galaxies and stars evolve. Together with other missions conducting wide surveys, like NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, UVEX will help create a modern map of our universe that extends across different wavelengths of light. The UVEX observatory will also be able to quickly point toward sources of ultraviolet light in the universe, capturing the explosions that follow bursts of gravitational waves caused by merging neutron stars.
The mission’s principal investigator is Fiona Harrison at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Other institutions involved in UVEX include University of California at Berkeley, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Northrop Grumman, and Space Dynamics Laboratory.
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