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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      SoylentNews reported on the loss of Japan's Hitomi spacecraft in March [soylentnews.org] and the value of the small quantity of data [soylentnews.org] that it was able to return before its demise. Now NASA is considering contributing a replacement for the X-Ray Spectrometer in another Japanese mission.

      SpaceNews [spacenews.com] reports:

In a presentation to the astrophysics subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council's science committee July 20, Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division, said the Japanese space agency JAXA has approached NASA about contributing a copy of its Soft X-Ray Spectrometer (SXS) for a new version of Japan's Hitomi spacecraft.

      [...]

      JAXA leadership is now talking about building a copy of Hitomi that could launch around the end of the decade. "JAXA has announced their intent to study a rebuild of Hitomi," Hertz said, referring to that new spacecraft as ASTRO-H2. NASA, he said, is now studying developing a "build-to-print" version of the SXS for that new spacecraft.

      [...]

      Hertz said that JAXA had requested insights from NASA in how to improve their mission assurance efforts, and that NASA agreed to share its knowledge with them. "We're not satisfied with merely making sure the previous mistakes can't happen again," he said. "We intend to work with JAXA to review best practices and the state of the art in managing these complex systems."

      "NASA doesn't want to get into a partnership," he said later in the discussion, "unless we're confident it's going to result in a successful mission."

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