Author Topic: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft  (Read 1680 times)

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Offline Buster's Uncle

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NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« on: June 28, 2013, 09:29:12 pm »
Quote
NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
PR Newswire
21 minutes ago


WASHINGTON, June 28, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- 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 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 re-entering the atmosphere. GALEX met its prime objectives and its mission was extended three times before NASA decided to end it.

Highlights from the mission's decade of sky scans include:
The discovery of 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.
The discovery of 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 Caltech, 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 some areas of the sky 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.

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 (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

A slideshow showing some of the popular GALEX images can be seen here:

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.

Graphics and additional information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer are online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/galex
http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-decommissions-galaxy-hunter-spacecraft-200400121.html

Offline Unorthodox

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Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #1 on: July 02, 2013, 09:47:43 pm »
Why couldn't they sell it/loan it out still?   Better than shutting it down. 

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Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #2 on: July 02, 2013, 09:54:03 pm »
Good question.

Offline Geo

Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #3 on: July 04, 2013, 07:43:37 am »
Perhaps there weren't that many loaners anymore?
Or the flight staff is needed for other tasks?

Offline Unorthodox

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Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #4 on: July 05, 2013, 06:15:06 am »
Perhaps there weren't that many loaners anymore?
Or the flight staff is needed for other tasks?
So sell it to a university at a discount

Offline Geo

Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #5 on: July 05, 2013, 08:59:11 am »
Wow. American uni's have a department budget of a couple million dollars??!   :o

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Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #6 on: July 06, 2013, 12:14:35 pm »
Why should it cost that?  It's better to get 10k (probably could get a bunch more) for the thing than to get nothing. 

Offline Geo

Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #7 on: July 12, 2013, 04:16:07 pm »
Why should it cost that?  It's better to get 10k (probably could get a bunch more) for the thing than to get nothing.

That's only the instrument. This buyer needs to set up, maintain, and staff a ground station.
And then comes data-analyzingm So I don't think a couple million is an exageration.

Offline Unorthodox

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Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #8 on: July 12, 2013, 07:35:41 pm »
We're going to have to disagree on the cost estimate, but it doesn't matter. 


Quote
In a first-of-a-kind move for NASA, the agency in May 2012 loaned GALEX to Caltech, which used private funds to continue operating the satellite while NASA retained ownership.
CLEARLY, Caltech was able to come up with the funds to maintain the satellite for a year.  This would have included paying the NASA ground crew to maintain whatever.  I have to believe you can get that done cheaper with a mixture of students and staff. 

Toss em a bone and let the buy them damn hardware. 

Offline Geo

Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #9 on: July 15, 2013, 06:24:25 am »
Just read the Kepler program needs about 20 million a year. Granted, using students would decrease staffing costs by quite a bit.

Offline Unorthodox

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Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #10 on: July 15, 2013, 02:37:33 pm »
Kepler's in a heliocentric orbit, GALEX is in near earth orbit.  You can't compare the costs of communication. 

Offline Geo

Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #11 on: July 16, 2013, 08:38:45 pm »
I don't even know the costs of communication. ;)
I can well imagine bigger dishes and better filters are needed to receive data from Kepler.

Offline Unorthodox

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Re: NASA Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
« Reply #12 on: July 17, 2013, 03:02:11 pm »
Possibly having to bounce the signal off a NEO satelite to receive data, kinda depends how the data needs to be transmitted.   

 

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