A satellite was launched Tuesday from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture in a bid to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts related to natural disasters. The Himawari-8 weather satellite soared aloft aboard an H-IIA rocket at 2:16 p.m. It was expected to be ...
Japan, four other countries to build world's biggest telescope in Hawaii
Japan, the United States, China, Canada and India are scheduled to launch work Tuesday to build the world's biggest telescope, known as the 30-meter telescope, or TMT, near the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano on Hawaii Island. They plan to complete the construction in ...
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will launch its Hayabusa2 asteroid explorer aboard an H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture on Nov. 30, officials said Tuesday. The probe is a successor to the Hayabusa, which returned to Earth in June 2010 after ...
As Indian orbiter reaches Mars, at home, red tape binds space firms
As India celebrated becoming the first Asian nation to reach Mars, S.M. Vaidya, head of business at conglomerate Godrej's aerospace division that made the spacecraft's engine and thruster components, sounded surprisingly downbeat. The mission was, indeed, a major achievement, he said, and one of which ...
Water found in Earth's oceans, in meteorites and frozen in lunar craters predates the birth of the solar system, a study published on Thursday shows, a finding with implications for the search for life on other planets. Scientists have long debated whether the solar system's ...
An unmanned Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday to deliver a cargo ship to the International Space Station for NASA. The 208-foot-tall (63-meter-tall) booster, built and launched by privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, bolted off its ...
Astronaut Wakata visits NASA to monitor progress on rain satellite network
Astronaut Koichi Wakata visited a NASA facility Wednesday to monitor the progress being made on a satellite network designed to monitor rain and snowfall worldwide. The system being jointly developed by Japan and the United States. Wakata, who became the first Japanese commander of the International ...
NASA's hunt for dangerous asteroids faltering despite 10-fold budget hike
NASA won't meet a congressionally ordered goal to find 90 percent of nearby and potentially dangerous asteroids larger than 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter, the agency's inspector general said on Monday. The shortfall comes despite a 10-fold increase in NASA's annual budget over the ...
Asteroid-mining race starts with few laws in place
Nobody is expected to start mining asteroids this decade, but the U.S. Congress is to hold hearings on the Asteroids Act, legislation that takes a simple line: If you extract a resource from an asteroid, it's yours.
NASA's new heavy-lift rocket, designed to fly astronauts to the moon, asteroids and eventually Mars, likely will not have its debut test flight until November 2018, nearly a year later than previous estimates, agency officials said on Wednesday. NASA is 70 percent confident of making ...
Defense Ministry eyes space as new missile detection frontier
The Defense Ministry plans to use space more effectively to detect early signs of ballistic missile launches by North Korea and bolster Japan's defensive capabilities, a draft of its new space policy showed Friday. In the basic policy to be formally adopted by the end ...
First dust particles from interstellar space are found in samples collected from comet
A NASA spacecraft that was dispatched 15 years ago to collect samples from a comet also snared what scientists suspect are the first dust specks from interstellar space. The Stardust robotic spacecraft was launched in 1999 to fly by a comet and collect samples from ...
