Japan lost communication with its newly launched, state of the art satellite that is equipped with X-ray telescopes according to JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). The space telescope's main mission is to study black holes among many other space events.

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On Sunday, the space agency released a statement that revealed this technical problem that started on Saturday afternoon, where mission scientists still do not know the status of the satellite, ASTRO-H Hitomi. The satellite was launched last February 17 but it has been trying to re-establish a connection over the weekend. 

According to an official from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Saku Tsuneta, they did not know when will the communications with the satellite resume. Local media reports also say that astronomy observations that are scheduled for the summer will be postponed if this problem will persist. To date, the Japanese space agency did not respond for any comments about the ongoing technical difficulty.

According to astronomer Jonathan McDowell from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he was already suspecting that the satellite might have been suffering from an "energetic event" which is probably caused by a gas leak or exploding battery which hurtled the satellite off orbit. This suggests that the antenna of the satellite is no longer directed at the proper position which could probably explain why the satellite is not responding with JAXA.

Apart from losing communications completely with Earth, another possible danger is that the satellite might not collect enough solar energy for its panels which can lead to an imminent battery drain that can run out even before the space agency can attempt to fix this problem and is able to re-establish connection completely.

McDowell says that everyone is "gutted" to hear this news of running into this bad luck which so very sad. McDowell, who also worked with another space X-ray telescope, NASA's Chandra telescope, says that he knows enough how this works and it could have easily happened to us, adding that, space is very unforgiving.