By Ron Cowen
On Jan. 30, 13 months after NASA ended observations with the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer spacecraft, the satellite plunged into Earth’s atmosphere and burned up over central Egypt.
Launched in 1992, the craft was the first mission to explore the heavens at ultrashort ultraviolet wavelengths, which can’t make it through Earth’s atmosphere. The observatory catalogued more than 1,000 sources of extreme-ultraviolet radiation within the Milky Way and was the first to record these emissions from another galaxy.