The Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope UIT was one of three ultraviolet telescopes on the ASTRO-1 mission flown on the space shuttle Columbia during 2-10 December 1990. The same three instruments were later flown on the space shuttle Endeavour from 3-17 March 1995, as part of the ASTRO-2 mission. Exposures were obtained on 70-mm photographic film in the 1200-3300 Å range using broadband filters and later digitized using a Perkin-Elmer microdensitometer. Image resolution was 3" over a 40' field of view. Overall, UIT-1 obtained 821 exposures of 66 targets, and UIT-2 obtained 758 images of 193 targets.

The Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UIT) Near-UV Bright Objects Catalog is a photometric catalog of 2244 objects detected by the UIT in the near-ultraviolet (NUV; 1650A-16ergs/s/cm2/A, but the survey is not complete to this level. Optical catalogs were used to cross identify sources and derive near-UV to Johnson V colors. A majority of the objects (88%) do indeed have proposed optical identifications from catalogs, and most are stars. The authors' purpose in creating the catalog was to form a database useful for identifying very blue objects and for performing Galactic UV stellar population studies. This database was created by the HEASARC in November 2000 based on a machine-readable version obtained from the CDS (Catalog J/ApJS/104/287). This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

The FUV instrument takes 2D images of the Earth’s horizon in the Far ultraviolet. The imager is pointing approximately 90 degrees to the spacecraft motion, similar to looking out of the side window of a car as it drives down the road. Onboard electronics read the CCD detectors 8 times per second and collect the data into radiance profiles every 12 seconds. The calibrated level 1 radiances and Level 1 ancillary spacecraft data are combined in a limb retrieval to produce the level 2.4 O/N2 limb product.

The Berkeley Extreme and Far-UV Spectrometer (BEFS), flew on the Orbiting and Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrograph (ORFEUS)-SPAS I and II space shuttle missions in 1993 and 1996, returning high-resolution (/3000) FUV spectra (900-1200 Å) of 75 astrophysical objects from the first flight and more than 100 from the second. EUV spectra (400-900 Å) were obtained for a subset of these targets.

The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), launched on June 24, 1999, covers the 905-1187 Å spectral region and will obtain high resolution spectra of hot and cool stars, AGNs, supernova remnants, planetary nebulae, solar system objects as well as perform detailed studies of the interstellar medium. FUSE will be able to observe sources 10 000 times fainter than Copernicus, an early FUV mission, and has superior resolving power than the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) and the Berkeley Spectrograph (BEFS) and the Tübingen Echelle Spectrograph (TUES) of the Orbiting Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrometers (ORFEUS). FUSE was planned for a 3 year lifetime with funding for an additional 2 years expected.

The IMAGE extreme ultraviolet (EUV) imager detects resonantly scattered solar EUV photons with a wavelength of 30.4 nm that have been resonantly scattered by singly ionized helium (Sandel et al., 2000). The sizeable database of IMAGE global snapshots from the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) imager provides revolutionary observations of spatial and temporal plasma distributions throughout the plasmasphere. In this study, the IMAGE EUV data have been mapped to the equator using the approach detailed in Gallagher et al. (2005). IMAGE EUV data have been used to create an automated method that locates and extracts the plasmapause. The plasmapause extraction technique searches a set range of possible plasmasphere densities for a maximum gradient in order to identify the magnetic local time, MLT, dependent plasmapause position as a function of time. This description has been adapted from text appearing in Katus et al. (2015).