KAGOSHIMA – Japan successfully launched on Saturday the world’s smallest satellite-carrying rocket following a failed attempt in January last year, the nation’s space agency said.

The rocket about the size of a utility pole, measuring 10 meters in length and 50 centimeters in diameter, lifted off from the Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture and delivered its payload to its intended orbit, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The No. 5 vehicle of the SS-520 series carried a microsatellite weighing about 3 kilograms developed by the University of Tokyo to collect imagery of the Earth’s surface.

The launch was aimed at verifying JAXA’s technology used to launch small rockets made with commercially available components at lower cost amid growing global demand for microsatellites. The agency used components found in home electronics and smartphones for the rocket.

JAXA launched the No. 4 vehicle on Jan. 15 last year, but terminated its flight shortly after liftoff due to a communications problem. The agency found that vibrations during liftoff caused a short circuit, leading to a loss of power in the data transmitter.

For Saturday’s launch, the agency made more than 40 improvements to prevent a recurrence.

Source: Japan successfully launches world’s smallest satellite-carrying rocket | The Japan Times

The Kepler Space Telescope has found oodles of exoplants, but now astroboffins have spotted the first exoplanets outside our galaxy.

A group of astroboffins from the University of Oklahoma has become the first to demonstrate exoplanet observations in another galaxy – one that’s 3.8 billion light years away, or one-third of the distance across the observable universe.

The discovery by a team led by professor Xinyu Dai and postdoc Eduardo Guerras, found the planets’ signatures in the spectrum of a gravitationally-microlensed galaxy behind the black hole quasar RXJ 1131−1231.

Gravitational microlensing refers to the phenomenon, predicted by Einstein, that gravity can bend light, resulting in an apparent magnification if the bodies are aligned the right way (from the point of view of the observer).

As the university explains, they believe the planets range in estimated mass from about the size of the moon, through to Jupiter-sized.

Their paper, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and available here at the arXiv pre-print service, explains that the unbound planets they saw caused “Fe Kα line energy shifts” in the spectrum of RXJ 1131−1231.

They found the line shifts in Chandra X-ray Observatory images of the quasar, and in the paper said what they observed “has never been observed in a non-lensed AGN” [active galactic nucleus – El Reg].

The paper also explains that the researchers focussed on unbounded planets – that is, planets wandering around their galaxies rather than being part of a solar system – because planets orbiting stars don’t show up separately from their hosts.

There are around 2,000 moon-to-Jupiter sized planets for each main sequence star in their observations, the researchers wrote, which equates to trillions of stars per galaxy.

Source: Exoplanets from another galaxy spotted – take that, Kepler fatigue! • The Register