Japan – Page 20 – Spaceflight Now

Stormy weather in Florida delays Falcon 9 launch

May 4, 2016

SpaceX has delayed a planned Falcon 9 launch with a Japanese communications satellite to Friday due to inclement weather on Florida’s Space Coast.

Hold-down test firing complete for next SpaceX launch

May 2, 2016

SpaceX technicians are attaching a Japanese communications satellite to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket ahead of a planned launch Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral.

Commercial Falcon 9 rocket launch scheduled for next week

April 29, 2016

SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 rocket launch is set for no earlier than May 5, sources said Friday, with a Japanese television broadcasting satellite heading to orbit from Cape Canaveral.

Japan gives up on rescuing black hole observatory

April 29, 2016

Japan’s space agency says it has ceased efforts to rescue a failed X-ray astronomy satellite after it spun out of control and broke apart in orbit, declaring the nearly $400 million mission lost two months after its launch.

Attitude control failures led to break-up of Japanese astronomy satellite

April 18, 2016

Japan’s Hitomi X-ray observatory, beset by an attitude control problem that has disrupted communications since March 29, may have shed one of its power-generating solar panels or deployable telescope in orbit and is spinning too fast to contact ground controllers, officials said.

U.S. military rules out collision as cause of Hitomi satellite’s woes

March 29, 2016

As Japanese ground controllers struggle to restore communications with a tumbling space telescope in orbit, the U.S. military’s space surveillance experts have eliminated one cause for the satellite’s troubles.

Japan’s newest space telescope goes silent

March 27, 2016

Japan has lost contact with the newly-launched Hitomi space telescope, and ground observations indicate the satellite has shed debris and may be tumbling in orbit more than 350 miles above Earth.

Photos: H-2A rocket soars on groundbreaking astronomy mission

February 19, 2016

Burning a mixture of super-cold liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen and pre-packed solid propellant, Japan’s H-2A rocket vaulted into a deep blue evening sky over the beaches of Tanegashima Island on Wednesday with a satellite that will see the surroundings of black holes better than ever before.

Black hole observatory launched from Japan

February 17, 2016

Japan launched a pioneering observatory with X-ray vision Wednesday to peer into the mysterious, light-starved neighborhoods around black holes and study the genesis of galaxies and other cosmic mega-structures billions of light-years from Earth.

Live coverage: H-2A rocket delivers on 30th flight

February 16, 2016

Japan’s Astro-H mission, an X-ray astronomy observatory designed to shed light on black holes and the unseen structure of the universe, lifted off aboard an H-2A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center at 0845 GMT (3:45 a.m. EST) Wednesday.