Japan lost its contact with is new X-ray space telescope last Sunday and now, this mission appears to be doomed. According to the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) they have been trying to re-establish contact with their  X-ray Astronomy Satellite Hitomi (ASTRO-H) over the weekend. The satellite was launched last February 17 that aims to study black holes and other mysterious space events.

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ASTRO-H or Hitomi is a joint project of JAXA and NASA as its mission is to further investigate how clusters of dark matter and dark energy formed and to learn how supermassive black holes form and evolve in the core of galaxies. 

JAXA obtained two really brief communications with Hitomi however, this is not enough for mission scientists to decipher or identify the origins of this technical problem. According to the United States Joint Space Operations Center, they detected some debris in the area of Hitomi where JAXA released an announcement on March 29 stating that, it is estimated that Hitomi was separated into five pieces at 10:42 A.M. local time.

The X-ray space telescope was slated to be a crucial part among the fleet of space telescopes currently used by astrophysicists and cosmologists, carrying a state of the art X-ray micro-calorimeter that can observe X-rays from space which is now in jeopardy due to this unexpected collision.

To date, there is still no exact explanation from JAXA what are the details of this event as Japan is now utilizing all its ground stations all over the globe to try and communicate with their observatory. Also, there is no exact explanation that the spacecraft was broken apart as all press releases are translated and the context of "separating into five pieces" remains unclear.

Some experts weigh in that it could possibly be a small explosion that occurred from space debris that are travelling in the area of the Hitomi satellite, it is also possible that JAXA will still try to re-establish communications with the observatory in the days to come.

However, this still does not mean that Hitomi is doomed from any rescue attempts. Previous JAXA success on rescues like this only happened last year when they managed to establish contact again with the Akatsuki probe that is orbiting around Venus which spent five years hurtling around space.