The failure of a Japanese M 5 rocket Thursday has shattered hopes that the Astro E X-ray observatory would complete a trio of high-powered orbiting telescopes to gaze at some of the highest-energy objects in the universe.

The rocket, which was carrying the $105 million Astro E, careened off course less than a minute after launch from the Kagoshima Space Center in southern Japan at 10:30 a.m. local time. Officials at Japan's Institute of Space and Astronomical Science (ISAS), the agency in charge of the Astro E, have acknowledged that the satellite was likely destroyed as it fell back into Earth's atmosphere.

Had the satellite made it into orbit, it would have passed over Japan an hour and a half after launch, but mission operators were not able to detect any signal from the craft at the time of its scheduled pass.

Japanese television is reporting that a failure in the rocket's first stage occurred 42 seconds after launch, causing pressure in the inner combustion cell to drop precipitously.

The rocket veered off course and failed to achieve the velocity it needed to put the satellite into a proper orbit, according to a statement released by the ISAS after the incident. The statement reported that the second and third stages of the launch vehicle appeared to work, but they could not make up the velocity deficit, and the satellite did not reach the desired orbit.

The heart of the Japanese-built telescope was a NASA X-ray calorimeter that was originally scheduled to fly aboard the Chandra X-ray Observatory, until budget constraints forced NASA to scale back its plans, and reach an agreement for ISAS to fly the instrument.

Steve Holt, the Astro E project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center confirmed that the failure appeared to be with the rocket's first stage, which should have lofted the vehicle to an altitude of 155 miles (250 kilometers).

"It looked visually -- from those of us who were watching the launch on a little webcast -- that everything was fine," Holt said. Separation and second-stage ignition appeared to go off perfectly. "However, as we found out later, the first stage underperformed. It only got to about 80 kilometers (50 miles), and as a result, the satellite never made it to its proper orbit," he said.

Scientists had looked forward to using Astro E to run high-resolution spectroscopy of extremely high-energy objects. This feature would have allowed astronomers to discover the composition of very hot, X-ray-emitting objects better and much more quickly than can be done with imaging X-ray telescopes like Chandra and XMM, Holt said.

"Imaging just gives you a picture, but it doesn't give you what you might think of as a color picture," he said. "In learning about those colors, you learn about the velocities of the gas that's moving and the ionization states in the gas, and that's something that we just can't recover until we can fly a mission like this again."

The astronomy community will have to take a hard look at how to replace Astro E's scientific mission, but Holt said he hopes a replacement could be built within four years.

The satellite would have returned unique information that will now be painfully absent, said Martin Weisskopf, Chandra Project Scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "The hope would be that for only a few dollars more -- you already have the plans -- you can re-build a replacement for a lot less money," Weisskopf said.

Scientists throughout the X-ray astronomy community have expressed their dismay at the loss of Astro E.

"We tend to think of all these missions as international," said Mike Watson, the survey scientist for the XMM telescope who works at the University Leicester in England. "There's vastly different science that Astro E was aiming at, so not being able to do that is really a loss to astronomy."