It is said that you cannot recapture the childhood magic of Christmas. But any astronomer watching the skies on December 25 in 2021 will beg to differ. Because the most powerful space telescope ever constructed was about to launch. Our researchers take us through the first year of Webb.

Despite both radar and optical observations from Earth, asteroid Phaethon was proving elusive. "Phaethon’s orbit is special compared to other near-Earth asteroids,” explains Yoshida Fumi at the Planetary Exploration Research Center, Chiba Institute of Technology, and the University of Occupational and Environmental Heath, Japan. “There’s never a chance to observe Phaethon from Earth with a solar phase angle of zero degrees.”

In early September of 2022, Scientists around the world were anxiously pondering one important question: if it became necessary... if the future of life on our planet was at stake... could we save the Earth? It was time to find out.

"As something falls from a high position to a low position, it gains kinetic energy by losing gravitational potential.” It is a sentence that could belong in any physics textbook. But Associate Professor Yamaguchi Hiroya is not discussing the quintessential student problem of dropping an object into a well. Instead, he is describing the formation of the largest structures in the Universe: galaxy clusters. The activity within these cosmological monoliths have long remained unclear, but this is set to change with the launch of the XRISM X-ray Space Observatory next fiscal year.

Excitement is mounting for the inaugural launch of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS). But onboard one of the largest rockets ever built are two of the world's smallest spacecraft that will help test technology for future human exploration.

“Life cannot survive unless it can be born somewhere,” points out Associate Professor Suzuki Shino in the Department of Interdisciplinary Space Science at ISAS. “To discover extraterrestrial life, we must therefore understand the kinds of planetary environment that can produce life. So searching for the origin of life and extraterrestrial life are two sides of the same coin.”

Approximately 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe is believed to have exploded into existence in an event known as the Big Bang. But what happened immediately afterwards has been difficult to determine. Searching for evidence is the task proposed for the ISAS mission LiteBIRD, which is currently scheduled to launch in 2027.

“We need long term and sustainable collaboration, despite societal and political changes. This is what we call a friendship in our private life, and it is our obligation to establish these institutional friendships as well.”