The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) lost contact with its flagship X-ray astronomical satellite, Hitomi, on 26 March. The observatory, launched on 17 February, had been going through initial check-outs and calibrations. 
 
 Hitomi's status remains unknown as JAXA engineers work to re-establish communication. Ominously, the US Joint Space Operations Center, which tracks space debris, reported spotting five objects in the vicinity of the spacecraft around the time that it went silent. The centre characterized the objects as pieces of a “break-up”. 
 
 The space debris could consist of minor pieces that were blown off Hitomi, as opposed to indicating complete destruction, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and space analyst at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
 
 Hitomi, which was known before launch as ASTRO-H, is designed to study X-rays streaming from cosmic phenomena such as black holes, galaxy clusters and dark matter. It carries a high-resolution spectrometer to measure X-ray wavelengths in exquisite detail. Earlier versions of the same instrument have twice met a grim fate on JAXA missions: in 2000, the ASTRO-E telescope crashed on launch, and in 2005, a helium leak aboard the Suzaku satellite crippled its spectrometer within weeks of launch. 
 
 Hope for recovery 
 
 JAXA lost contact with Hitomi at 4:40 p.m. Japan time on 26 March. “The cause of the communication failure is under investigation,” the agency said. It has, however, received at least one short signal from the satellite since then, and is working on possible ways to start talking to it again. 
 
 Agency engineers have pulled off spaceflight recoveries before. In December, JAXA placed the Akatsuki spacecraft into Venus orbit, five years after a failed engine burn seemed to doom the mission. And in 1993, a US X-ray mission named Alexis made it into orbit, but was not heard from for three months. Spacecraft engineers eventually recovered it, and it went on to do its planned X-ray science. 
 
 International partners on the Hitomi project include NASA, the European Space Agency, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the Canadian Space Agency. ||||| Researchers call it sheer coincidence that a newly discovered piece of space junk is officially designated WT1190F. But the letters in the name, which form the acronym for an unprintable expression of bafflement, are an appropriate fit for an object that is as mysterious as it is unprecedented. 
 
 B. Bolin, R. Jedicke, M. Micheli 
 
 Scientists have worked out that WT1190F will plunge to Earth from above the Indian Ocean on 13 November, making it one of the very few space objects whose impact can be accurately predicted. More unusual still, WT1190F was a 'lost' piece of space debris orbiting far beyond the Moon, ignored and unidentified, before being glimpsed by a telescope in early October. 
 
 An observing campaign is now taking shape to follow the object as it dives through Earth’s atmosphere, says Gerhard Drolshagen, co-manager in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, of the European Space Agency’s near-Earth objects office. The event not only offers a scientific opportunity to watch something plunge through the atmosphere, but also tests the plans that astronomers have put in place to coordinate their efforts when a potentially dangerous space object shows up. “What we planned to do seems to work,” Drolshagen says. “But it’s still three weeks to go.” 
 
 WT1190F was detected by the Catalina Sky Survey, a programme based at the University of Arizona, Tucson, aimed at discovering asteroids and comets that swing close to Earth. At first, scientists didn’t know what to make of this weird body. But they quickly computed its trajectory after collecting further observations and unearthing 2012 and 2013 sightings from telescope archives, says independent astronomy-software developer Bill Gray, who has been tracking the debris with astronomers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. 
 
 WT1190F travels a highly elliptical orbit, swinging out twice as far as the Earth–Moon distance, Gray says. Gray’s calculations show that it will hit Earth at 6:20 utc, hitting the ocean about 65 kilometres off the southern tip of Sri Lanka. Much, if not all, of it will burn up in the atmosphere, but “I would not necessarily want to be going fishing directly underneath it”, Gray says. 
 
 The object is only 1 to 2 metres in size, and its trajectory shows that it has a low density, and is perhaps hollow. That suggests an artificial object, “a lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us”, says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It could be a spent rocket stage or panelling shed by a recent Moon mission. It is also possible that the debris dates back decades, perhaps even to the Apollo era. An object seen orbiting Earth in 2002 was eventually identified as a discarded segment of the Saturn V rocket that launched the second mission to land men on the Moon. 
 
 WT1190F is a rare breed of space object. Researchers are currently tracking only 20 or so artificial objects in distant orbits, says Gareth Williams, an astronomer at the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are probably many more such pieces of space junk in orbit around the Earth–Moon system, but it is impossible to say how many. No others are known to have made the return trip to Earth, although it is likely that some have done so without anyone noticing, McDowell says. 
 
 Drolshagen plans to get spectral information on the object, which may help to identify it, and he hopes to coordinate impact observations conducted onboard ships or aeroplanes. But that may be the end of the concerted effort to study this class of object. Unlike near-Earth asteroids, space debris that flies well away from Earth has not commanded significant amounts of funding or attention. And the US military, which tracks space debris, says that it lacks the ability to identify WT1190F or to predict its path. 
 
 “There is no official, funded effort to do tracking of deep-Earth orbits the way we track low-Earth orbit,” McDowell says. “I think that has to change”.
– Japan has sort of lost something—a $273M satellite just launched to monitor X-rays coming from galaxy clusters and black holes, Discovery News reports. "We're taking the situation seriously," says Saku Tsuneta, a senior official at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). "We know approximately where it is." Launched Feb. 17, the Hitomi satellite was scheduled to be online March 26, but the connection didn't happen. The US Joint Space Operations Center then found signals from five objects close to the satellite, and tracking data shows Hitomi went significantly off course, Wired reports. Did Hitomi break up? Was it hit by an asteroid? Luckily, the Japanese "tend to be very good at resurrecting things that would otherwise be dead," says US space expert Moriba Jah. Case in point: Not long ago, JAXA steered the Akatsuki satellite to orbit around Venus after it went adrift for five years. JAXA could try solving the Hitomi mystery by tracing the paths of those five space objects to see "when the collision actually occurred," says Jah, though Wired calls the idea of an asteroid striking it "on its first day of work" a "crazy coincidence" (maybe Hitomi just blew up). Sadly, the high-resolution spectrometer on board to measure X-rays was ruined on two earlier Japanese missions, damaged on launch in 2000 and crippled by a helium leak in 2005, Nature reports. (The recent discovery of gravitational waves adds to evidence that black holes exist.)