UVEX Town Hall at the 249th AAS Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah

Tuesday, January 12, 2027, 12:45 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.

Title: UltraViolet Explorer (UVEX): Mission Status and Invitation to the Community Time-Domain and Target of Opportunity Program Town Hall 

Description: The UltraViolet EXplorer (UVEX) is a NASA Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) mission planned for launch in 2030. UVEX will conduct an all-sky, cadenced imaging survey in two ultraviolet bands (similar to GALEX but >50x deeper), perform serendipitous spectroscopic observations at R~2000-4500 in parallel with the imaging survey, generate streams of transient alerts, provide real-time follow-up of gravitational-wave sources and core-collapse supernovae with the first rapidly deployable UV spectroscopic capability in space, and enable the community to request their own time-domain and target-of-opportunity (ToO) observations beyond these. UVEX survey alerts and data products will be made available to the astronomical community, and are intended to be synergistic with other concurrent observatories for panchromatic and multi-timescale coverage. This Town Hall will present the current status of the mission, outline its science aims and data products, and describe the community-defined time-domain and ToO program, through which the community will define classes of transient events that trigger real-time UVEX observations. The session will include an extended period for questions, discussion, and community feedback.

For more information on AAS 249: https://aas.org/meetings/aas249