Japan successfully sent up a rocket carrying a satellite on Saturday. It has done the second time in less than a month. The H-2A rocket blasted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Kagoshima prefecture. It is carrying a 4,7-tonne satellite. The satellite will be used for checking air traffic and gathering meteorological data. After a year, the largest rocket in Japan's space program, the H-2A, successfully put a land-observation satellite into orbit in January. Both starts will likely bolster Japan's plans to enter the commercial satellite business and rise confidence among the country's space community. It’s a very important event after 2 unsuccessful starts of the H-2, the H-2A's predecessor, in the 1990s. Recently, Japan's space program appeared to have made history when JAXA declaimed in November, that an unmanned probe successfully collected rock samples from an asteroid nearly 300 million km from Earth. But the success soon turned to disappointment. The results, sent from the probe, showed that it had failed to collect samples.

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