No communications with new Japanese X-ray telescope
Bad news: Engineers have not been able to establish communications with Japan’s new X-ray telescope, Hitomi, since it was launched last month.
The JAXA announcement is very terse, and somewhat unclear, as its wording suggests that communications were not scheduled to begin until yesterday, even though the spacecraft was launched February 17. To me that does not sound right. Regardless, failure to establish communications at the beginning of a flight is usually a very bad thing, as it usually means something fundamental failed at launch and is thus difficult to fix or overcome.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
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Bad news: Engineers have not been able to establish communications with Japan’s new X-ray telescope, Hitomi, since it was launched last month.
The JAXA announcement is very terse, and somewhat unclear, as its wording suggests that communications were not scheduled to begin until yesterday, even though the spacecraft was launched February 17. To me that does not sound right. Regardless, failure to establish communications at the beginning of a flight is usually a very bad thing, as it usually means something fundamental failed at launch and is thus difficult to fix or overcome.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
That’s a shame. Another example that there is nothing routine about space.
Your immediately previous post and this one, in combination, form a kind of ironic pair. Too bad the DARPA fixerbot vehicle isn’t available right now. I think JAXA would be very interested.
Japan has a very ambitious and broad space program, ranging from their own launchers, own GPS, great planetary and astrophysical missions and even talk about an own human spaceflight program. And they go for doing it alone without much international corporation, as a sharp contrast to ESA which seeks to specialize on components in international missions (which rarely happen because they are international with a multitude of political interests to feed). And JAXA has only about a tenth of NASA’s budget. But their success rate is not so good. They’ve missed orbital insertions at both Venus and Mars, Hayabusa got very small sample from its asteroid, and other satellites have failed too. But their launcher works fine, so there are different causes for the failures.
Reading about Nozomi, the failed JAXA mission to Mars launched 1998 is interesting. A Lunar flyby and two Earth flybys to get to Mars, that’s unusual. A valve failed, then a solar storm damaged the electric system so that fuel froze but could be thawed, could not be inserted in Mars’ orbit. Many things go wrong. Maybe they are trying to do it too cheap or are over ambitious? With a larger launcher, or lighter payload, they could’ve gone to Mars directly, like everyone else always has done, and the problems would not have occurred.