JAXA-NASA Space Science Cooperation, June 2016

A day-long symposium on “U.S.-Japan Collaboration in Space Science–Past, Present and Future” was held in Washington, DC on June 10, 2016.  The meeting was sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.  Officials from NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and its Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) discussed cooperation in astrophysics, heliophysics and planetary exploration.  A major portion of the meeting was devoted to an explanation by ISAS Director General Saku Tsuneta of the failure of the Astro-H (Hitomi) x-ray astronomy spacecraft, a joint JAXA-NASA project.  He expressed hope that the two agencies could find a way to recover the science that was intended to be collected by the spacecraft.  Cooperation in asteroid sample return missions — JAXA’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx — was another highlight.  JAXA also discussed a Phobos sample return mission — Martian Moons Explorer or MMS — that it is considering as a future mission.

SpacePolicyOnline.com published a summary of the meeting on June 12, 2016.