The Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer Mission
(7 June 1992 - 31 January 2001)

The Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) was a NASA-funded astronomy mission operating in the relatively unexplored extreme-ultraviolet (70-760 Angstroms in wavelength, equivalent to 0.016-0.163 keV in energy) bandpass. The science payload, which was designed and built at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Dr. Roger F. Malina, consisted of three grazing-incidence scanning telescopes and an extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) spectrometer/deep survey instrument. The science payload was attached to a Multi-Mission Modular spacecraft.

The EUVE mission was launched on June 7, 1992 on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral. The first six months of the mission were dedicated to mapping the EUV sky with the scanning telescopes. Subsequent to that, the mission carried out its Guest Observer phase. The science goals of EUVE were to (i) carry out an all-sky, all-band survey in the extreme ultraviolet (70-760 A) in four bandpasses, with an angular resolution of 6 x 6 arc minutes and ~ 500 seconds average exposure, (ii) carry out a deep survey in the EUV in two bandpasses along the ecliptic, (iii) carry out pointed spectroscopy observations of targets identified by Guest Observers, (iv) identify the emission physics of EUV sources such as hot white dwarfs and late-type, coronal stars, (v) study the interstellar medium, and (vi) probe whether compelling science could be done with increased sensitivity in the EUV.

Late in 1997, NASA decided that the EUVE final data archive responsibilities should be transferred from the Center for Extreme-Ultraviolet Astrophysics (CEA) to the HEASARC, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and the National Space Sciences Data Center (NSSDC). The role of the HEASARC is to serve the publically available EUVE data and to act as an interface to the community of high-energy (X-ray and gamma-ray) astrophysicists, while that of the STScI is to provide similar access to the optical and UV community, as well as to maintain the EUVE IRAF-based software package. The role of the the NSSDC is that of a deep archive for the EUVE data and the servicing of requests for large amounts of EUVE data, i.e., for data volumes that are infeasible to retrieve over the Internet/WWW.

In the summer of 2000, NASA decided that EUVE mission operations should cease within a few months. EUVE science operations ended on January 26, 2001, and there followed several days of end-of-life mission engineering tests of the never-used backup high voltage supplies and checking of the remaining battery capacity. EUVE was stabilized pointing away from the Sun and sent into safehold at 23:59 UTC on Jan 31 2001. The transmitters were finally commanded off on Feb 2 2001. EUVE was left in a 424 x 433 km x 28.4 deg orbit which slowly decayed until it finally re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and was destroyed on Jan 30 2002, almost exactly one year after it ended science operations.

On March 27 2001, the CEA ftp and Web sites were closed down, although many of the CEA Web pages were moved to either the main UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory web site or to the Multi-Mission Archive at Space Telescope (MAST).