JAPAN launched a spacecraft on a two-year mission to study the planet Venus and its climate.

Japan launched a new spacecraft on a two-year mission to study the planet Venus and its climate.

IT MAY sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan’s space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collectsolar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams ormicrowaves.

Japan fired the world’s first greenhouse gas-monitoring satellite into space today, a launch deemed crucial in the country’s quest to compete globally in putting commercial satellites into orbit.

Japan plans to follow up its first lunar satellite orbit this month by sending an unmanned probe to land on the moon by 2015, news reports said today.

Japan’s space agency plans to launch an arrow-shaped airplane at twice the speed of sound high over the Australian outback in a crucial test of the country’s push to develop a supersonic successor to the retired Concorde.

Japan is planning a major scale-back of its troubled space program by focusing on smaller satellites and relying more on other countries for launches, a newspaper report said today.

Japanese space agency officials insist they have not yet lost Hope. But the fate of the country’s first interplanetary explorer - a Mars probe dubbed Nozomi, which means hope - is growing doubtful.

A Japanese satellite launched last year to observe global climate change has malfunctioned and stopped transmitting data, possibly due to a power failure, Japan’s space agency said today.