From Earth to the Moon With Love

At the 1970 world's fair in Osaka, where promotional displays from 76 nations competed loudly for visitors' attention, many Japanese stood in line, uncomplaining, as long as 12 hours for even a brief glimpse of a single object in the U.S. pavilion. That object was a tsuki no ishi, or moonrock, plucked the year before by the Apollo 11 astronauts.

Some made their way through the stadium-sized exhibit without so much as a glance at the Indianapolis race cars, major league baseball uniforms, laser-beam artworks and other displays. One elderly woman, adorned with a halo of snow-white hair, trudged through the whole pavilion without raising her eyes even to the tsuki no ishi itself. As she emerged, however, she shyly told me she had traveled 1,600 kilometers from the northern island of Hokkaido not to see anything but merely to be in the presence of a piece of the moon. It was an encounter, she said, that she looked forward to describing to her children.

The face of the moon -- Twelve years old -- About that, it may be. -- a haiku by Issa

The moon has exerted a special pull on the Japanese since the country's early history. And now Japan has become the third nation on Earth to launch a mission to the moon.

On Jan. 24, Japan launched its moon-bound spacecraft, called Hiten, into an elliptical orbit around Earth from the Kagoshima Space Center on the southern island of Kyushu. Hiten's only scientific instrument, developed by Munich Technical University in West Germany, will measure the velocities and masses of dust-sized meteoroids striking it in space.

"During our design study, we found that there was some extra available [payload] weight," Jun Nishimura, director general of Japan's Institute of Space and Aeronautical Sciences (ISAS), told SCIENCE NEWS. ISAS engineers considered several instruments as candidates for the mission, but Nishimura says they chose the micrometeoroid detector because it is the simplest in design and the lightest in weight.