The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is desperately trying to reestablish contact with its newest telescope, which was recently deployed to study black holes.
The satellite, called Hitomi or ASTRO-H, was supposed to start operating on Saturday March 26, but the spacecraft failed to communicate with Earth. Now, no one really knows where it is.
Hitomi, which launched on February 17, is a groundbreaking telescope designed to image emissions from black holes, the swirl of hot gas in galaxy clusters, and supernova remnants through high-energy photons, including X-rays and gamma rays.
Although the device briefly made contact with ground crews, the U.S. Joint Space Operations Center, which tracks space debris with radar, spotted five objects in the vicinity of the spacecraft around the time it went silent, suggesting the telescope itself could have broken up into several pieces.
This, however, does not yet mean a total loss. The space debris could indicate some minor pieces blowing off Hitomi as opposed to complete destruction, explained Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and space analyst at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"We're taking the situation seriously," added Saku Tsuneta, director of the agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.
Currently, JAXA has a team of about 40 technicians scouring the skies, trying to identify the spacecraft's precise location and establish some kind of communication with it -- not mention figure out what caused the communication failure.
Hitomi, which cost $273 million, was a joint collaboration with NASA. It was supposed to orbit at an altitude of about 360 miles. Astronomers are eagerly awaiting observations, as it is the first major X-ray observatory launched since 1999. Hitomi also carries a soft X-ray spectrometer that has 30 times the resolution of previous instruments and is expected to revolutionize the field.
While black holes have never been directly observed, scientists believe they are huge collapsed stars whose enormous gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape. An announcement made last month stating that gravitational waves had been detected for the first time added to a growing body of evidence supporting this theory, after scientists discovered the waves had formed following the collision of two enormous black holes.
Therefore, "if lost it would be a tragedy for our Japanese colleagues and a significant disappointment for U.S. collaborators working on the micro-calorimeter," concluded Ken Pounds, an X-ray astronomer from the University of Leicester in the U.K.
