Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) lost contact with the X-ray space observatory satellite last Saturday. Ground observes report that the Hitomi satellite is spinning out of control and in five pieces.
Intended to study super massive black holes at the center of our galaxy, the unique instruments on board will take years to replace.
Previous efforts to put equipment in space to observe in the X-ray spectrum have been scraped and it may take twelve years before another satellite will attempt to duplicate Hitomi’s capabilities.
Despite being broken up, JAXA has received signals from the Hitomi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFCU_Ld9snU&feature=player_detailpage
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Satellite sushi…
You don’t have to go to outer space to find a black hole. There are a few at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
What a flu king waste of money.
The Japanese don’t test their spacecraft like we do. No telling what happened, it could have been hit by any number of objects or suffered an internal explosion (more likely) from some failed component. This stuff his hard to do.
On a related matter, the James Webb Space Telescope is being assembled and tested and is inside of 20 months till launch. Here’s a very cool animation of the deployment sequence after launch…going a million miles out to Lagrange Point #2…it has to be right the first time because it ain’t never coming back…
Close to max launch payload for Arienne V and will require the largest launch shroud ever made for a single vehicle launch…first light in 2018…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTxLAGchWnA
Dr Tar,
A good story, and being of a technical mind, I personally find it interesting.
BUT (and you knew that was coming, didn’t you?), there were a couple of distractions that a little editing could have easily removed.
“Ground observes” => ground observers
“scraped” (to rub off a layer) => scrapped (to totally discard).
My apologies for disrupting your train of thought and story, an excellent story. Again, thank you for telling this to us.