Every Cosmic Herald story on JAXA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft is set to launch on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima on Oct. 19. It aims to bring about 10 grams of Phobos back to Earth in 2031, carrying NASA hardware and a French-German rover along the way.
Read the story →ESA's Ramses spacecraft, built with JAXA, has had its Core Module computer and subsystems switched on for the first time in Milan, a milestone in a compressed schedule to launch by spring 2028 for Apophis' April 13, 2029 flyby.
NASA confirms all three ground stations tracking the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope can receive its data at the full 500 Mbps rate, clearing a key hurdle before science operations begin in early 2027.
XRISM's Resolve instrument watched iron lines flip from absorption to emission during a flare from GX 301-2, giving the first direct spectroscopic evidence of stellar-wind plasma falling onto a neutron star.
After an eight-year, 9.9-billion-kilometer journey and nine planetary flybys, BepiColombo jettisoned its transfer module on Sept. 3, 2026, starting the final approach to a Nov. 21 Mercury orbit insertion.
On Sept. 3, ESA's Mercury Transfer Module separates from BepiColombo's two science orbiters, opening a sequence ESA calls among the most demanding it has ever run before November's orbit insertion.
After Typhoon Dolphin scrubbed one date and weather killed another, JAXA's H3 Flight 9 is now set to loft QZS-7 from Tanegashima on August 11 — completing Japan's seven-satellite GPS-augmentation system while hosting a second MIT Lincoln Laboratory surveillance payload for the U.S. Space Force.
At a Bengaluru meeting in late July, Indian and Japanese engineers finalized how their lander and rover will talk to and power each other on the Chandrayaan-5/LUPEX mission to hunt for lunar water ice.
Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, New Glenn, Vulcan Centaur, Neutron, Ariane 6, and six more launch vehicles compared on payload, cost per launch, and reusability, including China's Long March 10B, which on July 10 became just the third rocket in history to catch its own booster.
JAXA and Singapore's brand-new National Space Agency signed a memorandum in Tokyo covering quantum satellite links and industrial cooperation — NSAS's first international agreement, three months after it was founded.
On July 5, 2026, JAXA's Hayabusa2 extended mission buzzed near-Earth asteroid Torifune from roughly a kilometer away at 5 km/s, testing precision-guidance tech relevant to planetary defense ahead of its 2031 rendezvous with tiny asteroid 1998 KY26.
ESA and JAXA's joint BepiColombo mission spent six years threading through the inner solar system. Its arrival at Mercury orbit will answer questions about the planet's magnetic field and mysterious dark surface that MESSENGER couldn't fully resolve.
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