NASA’s next Astrophysics Medium-Class Explorer mission – UVEX, is targeted to launch by 2030, check mission objectives here

UltraViolet Explorer, or UVEX, is NASA’s new mission, which is targeted to be launched in the year 2030. This will be NASA’s next Astrophysics Medium-Class Explorer mission. UVEX is a space telescope meant to survey ultraviolet light across the entire sky.

You can check our earlier coverages of other NASA missions here.

Objectives of the UVEX mission:

Here are some of the primary objectives of the UVEX mission.

• The UVEX space telescope will conduct a highly sensitive all-sky survey to dive deep into insights about how galaxies and stars evolve.
• It will be able to quickly identify sources of ultraviolet light in the universe.
• The telescope will thus be able to capture explosions that occur due to the merging of neutron stars and the bursts of gravitational waves that follow.
• It will carry an ultraviolet spectrograph meant to study stellar explosions and massive stars.

A new @NASAUniverse space telescope will study the evolution of stars and galaxies.

Set to launch in the 2030s, UVEX, or UltraViolet EXplorer, will be able to quickly scan the sky for sources of ultraviolet light in the universe. https://t.co/40NxVbtHUS pic.twitter.com/zvMLhdKdbv

— NASA (@NASA) February 15, 2024

The UVEX will also complement data from other missions such as ESA’s Euclid mission and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (to be launched by May 2027), which are conducting wide surveys in this decade.

The UVEX mission is selected for a two-year mission.

Fiona Harrison at Caltech in Pasadena, California is the principal investigator of the mission. Institutions like the University of California at Berkeley, Northrop Grumman, and Space Dynamics Laboratory are also involved in the mission.

You can learn more about the UVEX mission here.