Japan’s X-ray astronomical satellite, Hitomi, launched on February 17th of this year, was completing a round of calibrations and initial checks when it suddenly lost contact with trackers on Earth, according to an article on nature.com.
Engineers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are working feverishly to re-establish contact with the spacecraft, but the current status of the satellite is unknown. Additionally, the United States Joint Space Operations Center reported spotting five objects near the area of the spacecraft at the time contact was lost, fueling fears of a break up. The US agency tracks space debris orbiting the planet.
That doesn’t mean the satellite has been completely destroyed, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and space analyst at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It could be some insignificant pieces of the vessel were blown off during a malfunction and the main part of the satellite could still be intact.
JAXA, which lost communication with the satellite at 4:40 PM, Japan time, on the 26th of March, says, “The cause of the communication failure is under investigation.” The agency continued to say they had received one short signal since that time and they are investigating all possible ways to re-establish the connection with Hitomi.
The satellite’s mission was to study X-rays streaming from cosmic phenomena like black holes, galaxy clusters, and dark matter, using a high-resolution spectrometer to measure in great detail the wavelengths of the X-rays.
Two other attempts by the space agency to launch a similar mission met with failure, when the ASTRO-E telescope crashed on take-off in 2000, and the spectrometer was disabled by a helium leak aboard the Suzaku satellite in 2005.
But the agency still hopes they can recover the control of this latest mission, and they have prior successes on which to pin their hopes. This past December, the agency managed to rescue the Akatsuki spacecraft by placing it into orbit around Venus, five years after a failed attempt at an engine burn threatened to scrap its mission.
In 1993, the US launched an X-ray mission of its own, named Alexis, that went silent for three months before engineers eventually re-established contact and allowed the satellite to continue its mission.