Sometimes, you lose control of things in your life, like your emotions, or maybe a car. Unfortunately for Japanese scientists, however, they have upped the ante by losing control of a satellite that costs more than a quarter of a billion dollars.
The Hitomi satellite was launched on February 17, 2016 and made it safely into orbit around Earth. Equipped with never-before-flown technologies purchased from NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency, it had an unprecedented potential to make breakthroughs concerning the motion of matter approaching the event horizons of black holes, the measurement of element abundances in the universe, and the evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters throughout cosmic time.
The top-of-the line equipment did not come cheap. The satellite cost $273 million (or 31 billion yen), and that’s not including the instruments bought from foreign agencies. And unfortunately, less than eight weeks into its studies, it is tumbling out of control.
Agencies aren’t sure what’s happening to the satellite
Currently, it’s unclear what exactly happened. On Saturday, the US Joint Space Operations Center noticed the satellite had five small objects around it. Following this, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) briefly managed to communicate with Hitomi, but quickly lost contact. Then, the spacecraft made a sudden change in its course, paired with a flash visible to some observers on Earth.
While JAXA has told the BBC it doesn’t know what happened, a plethora of experts have stepped in to give some ideas. Perhaps the satellite suffered a battery explosion or a gas leak, as Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, suggested to the Associated Press.
But Professor Goh Cher Hiang, who is the project director of the satellite program at the National University of Singapore, disagreed, telling the BBC that monitoring and backup systems would have caught or prevented those issues before they sent Hitomi flying.
“It could also be from a collision with something in space, either from outer space or a man-made object already in space,” he added—a notion that would fit in with the five small objects seen around the spacecraft before JAXA lost control.
“In general, [losing a satellite is] rare,” Goh added. “But it’s not impossible – it’s the reason a lot of people buy satellite insurance, just in case.”
This does not mean that Hitomi cannot be rescued, however. JAXA already has had some success on rescues before this—like last year, when they managed to get the Akatsuki probe to orbit around Venus after it spent five years drifting uncontrolled through space. And Hitomi is still believed to be mostly intact, and as long as communications can be restored, there is a good chance it can be saved.
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Image credit: JAXA
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