TITUSVILLE, Fla. — NASA has selected an ultraviolet observatory for development but will delay its launch by two years because of budget challenges.
NASA announced Feb. 13 that it chose the Ultraviolet Explorer, or UVEX, spacecraft as its next astrophysics Medium-class Explorer mission. The spacecraft will perform an all-sky survey at ultraviolet wavelengths and be able to identify ultraviolet sources of energetic events like neutron star mergers that create bursts of gravitational waves.
“NASA’s UVEX will help us better understand the nature of both nearby and distant galaxies, as well as follow up on dynamic events in our changing universe,” Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, said in a statement about the mission’s selection.
The $300 million mission will be led by Caltech astronomer Fiona Harrison, who was also the principal investigator on the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Small Explorer mission that launched in 2012. Other partners on UVEX include the University of California at Berkeley, Northrop Grumman and Space Dynamics Laboratory.
NASA said UVEX will launch in 2030. However, when NASA selected UVEX and another proposal, the Survey and Time-domain Astrophysical Research Explorer (STAR-X) mission, in August 2022 for further study, the agency said the selected mission would fly in 2028.
NASA spokesperson Alise Fisher told SpaceNews Feb. 14 that the two-year delay was linked to budget issues within NASA’s broader astrophysics program. “UVEX has a target launch date of 2030 to allow for an extended phase B to accommodate budget challenges within the Astrophysics Division portfolio,” she said. Phase B covers initial design work on a mission and includes a preliminary design review.
“Extending UVEX’s phase B allows us to prioritize missions already in development so that NASA can still fully support them, while also supporting the innovative UVEX concept,” she said.
The…
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