JAXA – Page 3 – Astronomy Now

Japanese probe fires rockets to steer into orbit at Venus

7 December 2015 Stephen Clark

Five years after missing a shot to enter orbit at Venus, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft completed a critical rocket burn early Monday in a bid to salvage the research mission and become the only space probe operating around Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor.

Japanese X-ray observatory completes decade-long mission

4 September 2015 Stephen Clark

An orbiting astronomical observatory launched 10 years ago to probe violent stellar explosions and black holes has been deactivated after it stopped regularly communicating with the ground, the Japanese space agency said Thursday.

IRIS and Hinode: a stellar research team

26 August 2015 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph satellite, or IRIS, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA)/NASA’s Hinode solar observatory, have just made a significant step towards understanding why the corona — the outermost, wispy layer of the Sun’s atmosphere — is hundreds of times hotter than the lower photosphere, which is the Sun’s visible surface.

Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2015 – report 3

8 July 2015 Astronomy Now

In his third report from the Royal Astronomical Society’s NAM2015, Kulvinder Singh Chadha examines the Sun in X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths from three different spacecraft, dons a virtual reality planetarium headset, and investigates if the proposed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could discern Earth-sized worlds that are habitable.

Supermassive black hole blasts star-making gas from galaxy’s core

26 March 2015 Astronomy Now

Many galaxies blast huge, wide-angled flows of material outward from their centres, pushing to their outer edges enough dust and gas each year that otherwise would have formed more than a thousand stars the size of our Sun. A team led by University of Maryland scientists has found the driving force behind these massive molecular outflows.

Japanese craft to get second chance after missing Venus in 2010

9 February 2015 Stephen Clark

Five years after a balky valve kept it from entering orbit around Venus, Japan’s Akatsuki space probe is again approaching the sweltering planet for another shot at completing its science mission in December.