"Broken up in orbit"? Naw, the thing is fine, structurally. Hopefully they can re-establish communications and get back on track.
Looks like the articles all changed. When I posted that, it said Broken up. http://www.nature.com/news/japanese-x-ray-satellite-loses-communication-with-earth-1.19642 Still sucks, this was going to be a neat mission.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 it went silent. The centre characterized the objects as pieces of a “break-up”.
Sounds like they mistakenly thought it had a collision? Totally sucks either way, agreed. More telescopes = more data on more frequency bands from more places.