GALEX Decommissioned after 10 Years of Service
NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft, NASA JPL
“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.”
UPDATE: Here’s a couple of images released yesterday.
– NGC 4565 Galaxy’s Pencil-Thin Profile
– NGC 6744 Big Brother to the Milky Way
The article doesn’t say why they’re turning it off. They turned it over to Caltech, so it looks like it’s not costing anything to run it… Is some part failing?
I assure you, it still cost money to operate, it’s just that CIT had raised private funds to do it. No funds, no mission. What is a little more obnoxious is that NASA is required to turn it off in a way that precludes ever turning it on again, apparently in the off-case it somehow turned back on and started transmitting. There were still a number of years before it fell back to Earth.
There is a real ‘vandal’ feel to this “don’t just turn it off, turn it off and break the switch” approach. It’s not just a cost-cutting measure, it seems as if the decision-makers are rejecting the whole concept of the mission as an embarrassment to be redacted.
I admit it’s obnoxious, but it’s part and parcel with worries about space debris and pollution of earth orbit. New satellites (above a certain mass?) have to have a de-orbiting plan. HST, for example, will either be brought down by robot or boosted to a high parking orbit. My understanding is that this (GALEX) is a frequency spectrum control measure.
It would be a rotten shame if it was turned off simply for lack of funds while it is still doing science. Funding an on orbit observatory. or simply maintaining it until funding comes available, is trivial relative to lofting a new one.
Just wondering, and I’m not trying to defend a position I know nothing about, but could it be a bandwidth issue? That is, with many of the existing TDRSS birds aging, and DOD not sharing their new ones, could this be some attempt to limit scheduling demands for data return? I’m assuming a lot, here, such as I don’t even know if GALEX uses a TDRSS link, but the same question could be asked no matter how the signal comes in. I know getting data back is always one of the items we must consider on the experiments I support.
WISE uses TDRSS, not sure about GALEX. It was sort of a bandwidth issue – I was told it was to prevent future potential radio interference.
This is just one of many satellites that will be “turned off” over the next 10 years. About half of the Earth observation satellites will be reaching their operational limits during this period, most because their fuel is running out, so it’s burn them up or send them away with their remaining fuel.
What concerns me is how much we’ve come to rely on these Earth observation satellites for data on weather, agriculture, temperature trends, ice monitoring, and so much more (even though they don’t get the publicity that other programs get) and we’re shortly going to lose so much of their overall capacity. It would cost a lot of money to replace them and I don’t see anywhere that this is being considered.
The lives, crops and property that might be saved with advanced notice of one Katrina-like storm alone would pay for building and launching a big chunk of the necessary replacements. No vision, no destiny, but a large dose of practicality.