[JAXA President Monthly Press Conference] JAXA President Monthly Regular Press Conference March 2016

Vice President Nakahashi retired on Feb. 26, as we have already told you, and Fumikazu Ito assumed the post of Vice President on March 1. Vice President Ito will take responsibilities of all work his predecessor did, hence he concurrently assumed the post of Director General of the Aeronautical Technology Directorate. Vice President Ito will later introduce himself and tell you his job resolution.

Through an organizational change on April 1, we decided to newly set up the “Work-Life Support and Diversity Office”. We already introduced the Gender Equality Office established in October 2013 for supporting working women to play more active roles. As a law for promoting more active roles for women will be enforced this coming April, and we also became a National Research and Development Agency last April to be a more creative organization to attain novel achievements, we decided to establish the Work-Life Support and Diversity Office with the aim to change the overall working styles in addition to the Gender Equality Office. We will also continue to operate the Gender Equality Office. To sum up, we are targeting to improve the productivity of all employees. We hope that, as a result of changing working customs, we can reduce overtime work in some sections that habitually require staff to work late, and we can also support female employees so that we can gradually establish a system for a better working environment to contribute to JAXA qualitatively and quantitatively.

We have been telling you that our Advanced Land Observing Satellite “DAICHI-2” (ALOS-2) has been dispatching disaster information in a timely manner, and the satellite regularly observes land bulging in volcanic regions even prior to disasters. The central emergency communications council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications decided to honor the DAICHI-2 project, and we are very pleased as our operation and observation results are highly recognized. We continue to work hard to dispatch accurate information and contribute to disaster prevention.

JAXA plans to hold a “Mirai Kyoso seminar” (future co-creation seminar) on March 23 (Wed.) As we’ve already announced the content of the seminar on the website and through other means, we hope to discuss how to define space and space development for the future with a broad range of organizations and industries participating beyond the space-related field. Space and space development have multiple facades including space technology, children’s dreams, and places for satellites to assist on the ground. Therefore, it cannot be explained in a single sentence. We will discuss how to determine the future space use with participating companies from various industries.

We mentioned about the loss of communication with the AKATSUKI. Its cause was clarified, and countermeasures have already been determined. Communication loss is fatal, hence we incorporated the measures into the manual for preventing a recurrence, and set up specific steps for these measures.

Hitomi completed its critical phase and everything is going normally. The Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS) reached cryogenic temperature, and other instruments are also being verified for their functions.

Hayabusa2 will turn on its ion engine on March 22 (Tue.), and it will emit thrust from the engine sometime by mid May. We will inform you of the detailed schedule when it is determined. Hayabusa2 is currently flying about 28.54 million kilometers from the Earth.

We established the Next Generation Aeronautical Innovation Hub Center last April, and, in order to further improve some of Center’s activities namely aviation flight safety of private planes, we decided to set up the “WEATHER-Eye Consortium” with 18 organizations including some airline companies, manufacturers, and research institutes. Accordingly we concluded the collaboration agreement. We will have a press meeting for the media on this matter at 2:00 p.m. on March 28 (Mon.)