[2]The proposal for the craft originated with the Space Astrophysics Group at the University of Berkeley who had previously been involved with the EUV telescope on the Apollo element of the Apollo–Soyuz mission.

[2] The goals of the mission included several different areas of observation using the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) range of frequencies: The science instruments were attached to a Multi-mission Modular Spacecraft (MMS).

[2] NASA described these instruments:[4] The EUVE Spectrometer was a three-fold symmetric slitless objective design based on variable line space grazing incidence reflection gratings.

The regions of the mirror devoted to the spectrometer and Deep Survey were defined at the front aperture, which was an annulus divided into six segments.

[5] In order to achieve good spectral resolution, any EUV spectrometer must be designed to limit the effect of diffuse sky radiation.

The medium and long wavelength channels of the EUVE Spectrometer have wire-grid collimators placed directly after the aperture before the mirror, which limit the grazing angles of the incident light to exclude some of the sky background.

They define broad bandpasses while screening out bright geocoronal and interplanetary lines such as Lyman alpha radiation and some higher orders of diffraction.

MCP detectors are electron-amplification devices that provided two-dimensional imaging and time-tagging of individual EUV photon events.

Each detector employs a biased stack of three porous quartz MCPs with a channel length-to-diameter ratio of approximately 80:1.

The stack acts as an electron multiplier, and is backed by a conducting anode, partitioned into a graduated "wedge, strip, and zigzag" pattern.

The top plate has an applied photocathode of potassium bromide (KBr), to enhanced the photoelectric response at EUV wavelengths.

Event positions (X, Y) are calculated by onboard instrument software (ISW) from the division of the charge cloud among the wedge, strip, and zigzag areas of the anode.

The instrument package contains four Wolter-Schwarzschild grazing-incidence telescopes (with EUV thin-film filters) to collect and to isolate radiation.

As the Earth moves around the Sun, the great circle is shifted by 1° each day and so the entire celestial sphere is surveyed in 6 months.

In this limited direction, the He II 304 Å background is almost completely absent, and thus higher sensitivity can be obtained for observing selected interesting objects.