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.

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: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.