JAXA Reschedules H3 Rocket Launch for Mon.

Tokyo, March 3 (Jiji Press)--The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said Friday that it will launch the country's first H3 rocket on Monday morning, after canceling an earlier launch attempt last month.

The rocket, carrying the Advanced Land Observation Satellite-3, or Daichi-3, is now scheduled to lift off from JAXA's Tanegashima Space Center in the southwestern Japan prefecture of Kagoshima between 10:37 a.m. (1:37 a.m. GMT) and 10:44 a.m.

The H3's maiden launch was earlier set for Feb. 17. It was canceled after the rocket's solid boosters failed to ignite despite the main engines in the first stage managing to ignite six seconds before the liftoff as planned.

In its later investigation, JAXA found that an anomaly had been detected in a system to supply electricity to the first-stage engines. A control system did not send an ignition signal to the solid boosters and cut off the main engines, according to the government-affiliated space agency.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Masashi Okada, the H3 rocket project manager, said that the control equipment had malfunctioned due to an electrical noise.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]