Years of hard work went up in smoke on Feb. 9 when the Japanese X-ray telescope Astro-E burned up just minutes after takeoff. Because of a problem with the first stage of its launch rocket, the craft never reached orbit and fell back toward Earth.
Intended to join two other recently launched X-ray telescopes—NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM) satellite—Astro-E would have measured the energies of individual X rays with unequalled precision.