Ahsoka Tano has always had to fight to prove her worth.

Deftly inserted into Star Wars canon 15 years ago as Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan, Ahsoka became an easy scapegoat for fans unimpressed by the animated storytelling of The Clone Wars. “All this new Ahsoka character brings to the table, other than a lightsaber-sized gash through the heart of continuity, are giggling one-liners,” one review said. “I just want to go up to that Padawan and slap her,” another said.

But while she may have started as a fresh-faced cartoon alien in an unfortunate tube top (voiced by the incredible Ashley Eckstein), Ahsoka grew into a powerful Force user, a Rebel leader, a wise mentor, and ultimately, a live-action character played by Rosario Dawson. Star Wars fans got to watch her entire arc play out in real time (not counting a few canonical blind spots). Now, she’s reached another critical inflection point: a starring role in her own adventure.

Seven years ago, astronomers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and their colleagues were wrestling with a dilemma.

The Hitomi spacecraft promised to unpack secrets of the highest-energy events across the universe, visible only in X-ray light. This is typically how astronomers find a black hole gobbling up matter, or capture the most critical details of a star exploding. Teams around the world were on the brink of success, as Hitomi gained a spectacular commissioning image of a cluster filled with thousands of galaxies.

But just a month after launch, the spacecraft began to spin uncontrollably, until it broke apart into pieces.

This week, there’s new hope for JAXA’s X-ray astronomy efforts, along with its international collaborators. A team of half a dozen NASA researchers has flown out to Tokyo, where they will then make their way to the south of Japan to the balmy island home to the country’s largest rocket launch complex, Tanegashima Space Center.

That’s where Hitomi’s successor will launch. Called the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM (pronounced “crism”), it is scheduled to launch on Saturday at 9:34 a.m. local time (Friday night at 8:34 p.m. Eastern in the United States). If it survives the commissioning phase (where a launched spacecraft is prepared for its official mission), XRISM will acquire the sharpest X-ray data to date about the most dynamic events in space.