UVEX provides critical ultraviolet capabilities that support and contextualize the observations from NASA Flagship missions, amplifying the returns of billions of dollars of investments in cutting-edge astronomical technology.

The wide-field and spectroscopic ultraviolet observations by UVEX will provide vital complementarity to NASA's current flagship missions that probe higher and lower energies of light, and puts highly-zoomed-in Hubble UV observations in an all-sky context. As the next generation of flagship missions come online, UVEX will provide ultraviolet data at a comparable depth to the Rubin and Roman surveys, and pave the way both scientifically and technologically for the Habitable Worlds Observatory in the coming decades.

UVEX will observe local, low-mass galaxies in ultraviolet light, their close distance allowing for very detailed study of their properties. The same kinds of low-mass galaxies at distances of millions and billions of lightyears are redshifted into infrared light, and are observed by the NASA flagship missions JWST and Roman. In order to understand the high-redshift observations of these kinds of galaxies, UVEX is needed to provide the detailed local universe context, helping to get the most out of these major investments.