Japan’s brand new space telescope has met a sad end.
On Thursday, the Japan’s space agency (JAXA) announced that they would stop attempting to communicate with the ASTRO-H space observatory after it was found that the telescope cannot recover from a failure that began in March.
The observatory — which is designed to study far-off objects like black holes and exploding stars in extreme detail — was launched on February 17, and was expected to have a long and healthy observational life in space.
Japan’s space agency started experiencing communications problems with ASTRO-H, also called Hitomi, on March 26, and since that time, agency officials have been attempting to regain control of the observatory, which was thought to be spinning out of control in its orbit.
Until now, there was some hope that the $265 million mission could be rescued. Scientists thought they’d received three signals from Hitomi since the problems began in March; however, the space agency is now saying that those signals were not sent by the spacecraft.
"JAXA will cease the efforts to restore ASTRO-H and will focus on the investigation of anomaly causes," the agency said in a statement.
New data has also revealed that both solar arrays have broken off the observatory, JAXA added.
“There is now a huge gap in humanity's toolkit for studying black holes, supernovae and energetic processes in the universe,” astronomer Jonathan McDowell told Mashable via email.
JAXA has not yet found the root cause of the fatal problem, but it plans to “carefully review all phases from design, manufacturing, verification, and operations to identify the causes that may have led to this anomaly,” JAXA added.
At the moment, it looks like the spacecraft experienced some kind of error which caused it to start rotating unexpectedly, leading to the separation of the solar arrays.
This kind of major failure is wide-reaching in the astronomy community.
Scientists from all over the world were relying on ASTRO-H to beam home data for research projects focused on looking at the universe in X-ray light. Some researchers and engineers spent decades working to make this project a reality.
Some astronomers expressed their disappointment over the end of the mission on Twitter:
While Hitomi’s life was short, it still reportedly produced some amazing science.
The telescope was able to observe both the Crab Nebula and Perseus galaxy cluster, according to Space.com, which could help scientists break down the exact science of how gas and dust behave in those regions of space.
At the moment, two other X-ray observatories are going strong.
Both Chandra and XMM-Newton are healthy, according to McDowell, but they are both more than 10 years old, a pretty advanced age for a telescope in space.
Other more specialized X-ray telescopes like NuStar are also still working, but they are smaller and unable to gather the kind of data Hitomi was collecting until its demise.
In 2028, the European Space Agency is expected to launch another major X-ray observatory called Athena, leaving a gap of about 12 years between ASTRO-H’s end and the launch of the next flagship telescope of its kind.
That gap may seem grim, but McDowell is hopeful that some kind of mission might be squeeze into the void left by Hitomi.
“I'm hoping Chandra will last till Athena goes up,” McDowell said. “But I think there's also an opportunity for a new fast-track mission to fill that gap.”
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