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

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.

Comments

My condolences

[Tablizer]

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.

Why only one

[Moof123]

Honest question here. We only make and launch one Hubble, one Jim Webb, etc. Design of these things is a large portion of the budget. The mirrors are the main item where the manufacturing cost greatly outstrips the design and tooling costs (I think?). So why don't we make a half dozen of each of these of these things instead of just one?

Re:Why only one

[meglon]

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.

Re:Why only one

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:Why only one

[thrich81]

I asked just that question of some people who build scientific spacecraft. They told me that building the second copy doesn't cost much less than the first one -- the second costs about 70% of the cost of the first was their guess. Economies of scale don't kick in for just a couple or few units. And you have to consider that these things seem to usually run over budget so any extra funds for a second spacecraft will be eaten up by overruns on the first unit. As far as building more than a few copies, by the time a science spacecraft actually gets built and launched the design is pretty old and the investigators would want to move on to the next generation rather than repeat capabilities. There have been times when twin spacecraft were built (Mariners 1&2, Mariners 3 Mariners 6&7, Mariners 8&9, Voyager 1&2, Viking 1&2) but those were a long time ago when launch vehicles were less reliable (Mariners 1, 3, and 8 were all lost to launch vehicle failures) and in those cases the second vehicle complemented the first rather than just providing redundancy.

Re:Speculate on Causes

[amicusNYCL]

Here's a tweet that shows a sudden change in orbital period. That could be consistent with an impact pushing it slightly closer to the planet. That's a small change, I think the Y axis on that graph is orbital period in minutes, so it only represents a change of about 2 seconds. Even so, it's obviously noticeable. Although it's a little odd that it didn't keep changing that quickly. If an impact pushed it into a slightly lower orbit it wouldn't just stop there, it would keep falling. Although maybe the impact came from the rear and it just slightly sped up the satellite. If the speed slightly increased then that should result in a 1-time drop in the orbital period.

Re:Speculate on Causes

[Anonymous Coward]

If an impact pushed it into a slightly lower orbit it wouldn't just stop there, it would keep falling.

That's not how orbits work. A lower orbit is still an orbit, and it's perfectly stable unless the satellite was pushed clear into the atmosphere. Without adding significant kinetic energy or subtracting it from the satellite, any impact that makes it deviate from its normal course would send it on a more elliptical orbit.

Re:We asked for it

[sl3xd]

Insane velocities. First off: Equatorial orbits are rare. This means nearly every orbit has a significant north/south vector. And we have polar orbits as well. In short: you have to try really hard to have anything resembling the same direction. Wolfram Alpha pegs the average orbital velocity at 29.8 km/s. Thes velocities can easily be nearly 'head-on' at 60 km/s of impact velocity. Even a fraction of a gram impacting at those speeds is a very bad day.

The ISS has over 100 shielding systems for kinetic impact (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield). EVA suits are designed to be 'bullet' proof, and to maintain pressure after being hit by a meteor (for a while, at least).

The space shuttle generally flew 'backwards and upside down' to attempt to protect the crew from impacts. (http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae524.cfm)

A big reason for the large inspection time between shuttle flights was to find & replace tiles damaged by micrometeors.

Seriously: space ain't a walk in the park.

Five Objects?

[tsotha]

Those five objects are going to reform into a giant robot.