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Japan Launches Navigation Satellite on New Flagship Rocket for Improved Positioning System

The H3 Launch Vehicle No. 5, carrying the Quasi-Zenith Satellite "Michibiki No. 6," lifts off at a launch pad in Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, Sunday Feb. 2, 2025. (Kyodo News via AP)
The H3 Launch Vehicle No. 5, carrying the Quasi-Zenith Satellite "Michibiki No. 6," lifts off at a launch pad in Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, Sunday Feb. 2, 2025. (Kyodo News via AP)
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Japan Launches Navigation Satellite on New Flagship Rocket for Improved Positioning System

The H3 Launch Vehicle No. 5, carrying the Quasi-Zenith Satellite "Michibiki No. 6," lifts off at a launch pad in Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, Sunday Feb. 2, 2025. (Kyodo News via AP)
The H3 Launch Vehicle No. 5, carrying the Quasi-Zenith Satellite "Michibiki No. 6," lifts off at a launch pad in Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, Sunday Feb. 2, 2025. (Kyodo News via AP)

Japan on Sunday launched a navigation satellite on its new flagship H3 rocket as the country seeks to have a more precise location positioning system of its own.

The H3 rocket carrying the Michibiki 6 satellite successfully lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center on a southwestern Japanese island. Everything so far has been as planned, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said.

Japan currently has the quasi-zenith satellite system, or QZSS, with four satellites for a regional navigation system that first went into operation in 2018. The Michibiki 6 will be the fifth of its network.

Michibiki’s signals are used to supplement American GPS to improve positioning data for smartphones, car and maritime navigation and drones.

Japan plans to launch two more navigation satellites to have a seven-satellite system by March 2026 in order to have a more precise global positioning capability without relying on foreign services, including the US, according to the Japan Science and Technology Agency. By the late 2030s, Japan plans to have an 11-satellite network.

Sunday's launch, delayed by one day due to the weather, was the fourth consecutive successful flight for the H3 system after a shocking failed debut attempt last year when the rocket had to be destroyed with its payload.

Japan sees a stable, commercially competitive space transport capability as key to its space program and national security and has been developing two new flagship rockets as successors to the mainstay H2A series — the larger H3 and a much smaller Epsilon system. It hopes to cater to diverse customer needs and improve its position in the growing satellite launch market.

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Study Says Climate Change Will Even Make Earth’s Orbit a Mess

In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
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Study Says Climate Change Will Even Make Earth’s Orbit a Mess

In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)

Climate change is already causing all sorts of problems on Earth, but soon it will be making a mess in orbit around the planet too, a new study finds.

MIT researchers calculated that as global warming caused by burning of coal, oil, gas continues it may reduce the available space for satellites in low Earth orbit by anywhere from one-third to 82% by the end of the century, depending on how much carbon pollution is spewed. That's because space will become more littered with debris as climate change lessens nature's way of cleaning it up.

Part of the greenhouse effect that warms the air near Earth's surface also cools the upper parts of the atmosphere where space starts and satellites zip around in low orbit. That cooling also makes the upper atmosphere less dense, which reduces the drag on the millions of pieces of human-made debris and satellites.

That drag pulls space junk down to Earth, burning up on the way. But a cooler and less dense upper atmosphere means less space cleaning itself. That means that space gets more crowded, according to a study in Monday's journal Nature Sustainability.

“We rely on the atmosphere to clean up our debris. There’s no other way to remove debris,” said study lead author Will Parker, an astrodynamics researcher at MIT. “It’s trash. It’s garbage. And there are millions of pieces of it.”

Circling Earth are millions of pieces of debris about one-ninth of an inch (3 millimeters) and larger — the width of two stacked pennies — and those collide with the energy of a bullet. There are tens of thousands of plum-sized pieces of space junk that hit with the power of a crashing bus, according to The Aerospace Corporation, which monitors orbital debris. That junk includes results of old space crashes and parts of rockets with most of it too small to be tracked.

There are 11,905 satellites circling Earth — 7,356 in low orbit — according to the tracking website Orbiting Now. Satellites are critical for communications, navigation, weather forecasting and monitoring environmental and national security issues.

“There used to be this mantra that space is big. And so we can we can sort of not necessarily be good stewards of the environment because the environment is basically unlimited,” Parker said.

But a 2009 crash of two satellites created thousands of pieces of space junk. Also NASA measurements are showing measurable the reduction of drag, so scientists now realize that that “the climate change component is really important,” Parker said.

The density at 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth is decreasing by about 2% a decade and is likely to get intensify as society pumps more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, said Ingrid Cnossen, a space weather scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who was not part of the research.

Cnossen said in an email that the new study makes “perfect sense” and is why scientists have to be aware of climate change's orbital effects “so that appropriate measures can be taken to ensure its long-term sustainability.”