NASA Permanently Turns off its Galaxy Evolution Explorer After a Decade of Operations

NASA permanently turned off one of its prized workhorses, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), after a decade of its launch.

After 10 years of service, NASA finally decided to retire GALEX that used its ultraviolet vision to study hundreds of millions of galaxies across 10 billion years of cosmic time.

"GALEX is a remarkable accomplishment," Jeff Hayes, NASA's GALEX program executive in Washington said in a press statement. "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."

On Friday signals to decommission GALEX was sent by operators at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va. The signals were sent on June 28 at around 3.09 p.m. EDT. For the next 65 years the spacecraft will stay in orbit and then fall to Earth and then self burn before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.

Prior to this, GALEX received an extension three times during which it met its prime objectives and conducted its set missions.

Few of the famous highlights of GALEX's mission included the discovery of a gargantuan comet-like tail behind a speeding star called Mira, spotting a black hole as it fed on a star and tracing giant rings of new stars around old and dead galaxies. It independently confirmed the nature of dark energy and it also identified the missing link in galaxy evolution.

 In May 2012, NASA loaned GALEX to Caltech. Since then GALEX had been used by investigators to study stars in Milky Way galaxy and other galaxies 5 billion light years away. GALEX scanned the sky for huge, feeding black holes as well as shock waves received from early supernova explosions.

"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.