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Japan's $273 Million Satellite Has Broken Up Into 'Multiple Pieces' (techinsider.io)

Posted by BeauHD on from the sad-day-for-astronomers dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that it has lost contact with its "Hitomi" satellite -- a state-of-the-art X-ray observatory, developed in conjunction with NASA, to spy on energetic processes in space including black holes, massive galaxies, and exploding stars. On Sunday, March 27, the Japanese Space Agency announced it had lost contact with the satellite on March 26, just a little more than a month after it was launched on February 17. Now, Members of the U.S. Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), a military organization that identifies and tracks space debris near Earth, said five objects were drifting near the location of Hitomi at around the same time it lost communication with Earth, Nature reports. It's being reported that Hitomi has separated into "multiple pieces" before March 26. Currently, there are about 40 JAXA technicians scouring the skies, trying to locate the expensive observatory.

4 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. My condolences by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Rest In Pieces

    Science took an unfortunate whack to the guts. I'm glad to see resources spent on science instead of war, however. Even with occasional failures like this, the overall payoff is usually far better than war of late.

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    Table-ized A.I.
  2. Re:Why only one by meglon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the OP is asking why we don't try to use economies of scale to lower the cost while increasing the science capabilities we have available. It's a perfectly good question, one that ultimately is probably answered by "there's too many politicians who don't see value in science." Hubble's been up there ~25 years, and has only resolved a small portion of space. If we'd placed 5 of them up there all working on separate things, we'd still only have resolved a small portion of space, but it'd be 5 times what we have now.

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    Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
  3. Re:Why only one by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The probable answer is that these devices are all painstakingly hand-made. I'd imagine there ARE no economies of scale with hand-made items of this size and complexity, at least, not enough to be significant, and not at such low counts. See: Space Shuttle.

    Also, consider this: if we had made five Hubbles, we would have screwed up all five of them with the same mistakes we made on the first one, and would never have been able to repair them all. It cuts both ways. We could barely pull together rescue and repair missions to repair the one craft.

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    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  4. Re:Why only one by khallow · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Hand-made routinely has economies of scale to it as well. And there's the obvious matter that there are huge one time costs in the development of the first spacecraft that would not need to be duplicated in copies.

    Also, consider this: if we had made five Hubbles, we would have screwed up all five of them with the same mistakes we made on the first one, and would never have been able to repair them all.

    You wouldn't need to. When the first one demonstrated the error in space, then you can remake the mirrors for the other four before launching them. The gyroscope problem also turned up well before the first service repair mission.

    So then you have one bad Hubble that you can deorbit and four working ones that you don't need to deorbit.