Japan Loses 2nd Satellite to Solar Flare

Japanese space agency officials, already forced to temporarily shut down one satellite, said Thursday they had lost contact with a second satellite that may have been affected by an electromagnetic storm caused by the largest solar flare observed in decades.

“We have completely lost touch with the Midori 2, and don’t know what’s going on with it,” said Junichi Moriuma, a spokesman for the agency, known as JAXA. He said the agency is trying to restore communications.

“At this point, we don’t know if there is a relation between this accident and the solar flare,” he said. “We are still in the process of figuring out what caused the problems.”

Midori 2 was launched in December 2002 and served as an environmental observation satellite.

Moriuma said communications with the satellite were lost on Saturday, amid the heightened solar flare activity. He said the solar flare is believed to be the second biggest ever observed and happens only once every couple of decades.

He said the agency’s main concern is that the particles and radiation emitted in the flare might destroy computer sensors.

The agency said Wednesday that the communications satellite Kodama had malfunctioned and had been switched into a safe mode after being hit by the solar flare.

But officials said the satellite, used as a data relay point, was to be reactivated when the solar activity subsided and added that the outage wasn’t causing any major communication disruptions.

The flare was believed to produce a particle cloud 13 times larger than Earth. The resulting geomagnetic storm was expected to be among the most powerful of its kind.

Kodama was launched on Sept. 10, 2002, from the southern Japan island of Tanegashima to transmit data between satellites and ground-based research facilities.

It was planned for seven years of operation.