🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BwsHM3.7ns.1@cs.cmu.edu> nickh@CS.CMU.EDU (Nick Haines) writes:
>...What is Hiten?

Hiten, aka Muses-A, is the Japanese engineering-test mission that has been
batting around the Earth-Moon system for a year or two.  It's not a science
mission, and has nothing to do with Geotail et al.

Actually, I exaggerate slightly...  Hiten has one science instrument, a
German dust detector, which has been returning some interesting results:

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11.05       Iglseder H.*   Grun E.   Munzenmayer R.   Svedhem H.
                Cosmic Dust and Beta-Meteoroids in the Earth-Moon System: More
                Than Two Years of Operation of the Munich Dust Counter MDC

On 24 January 1990, ISAS (The Institute of Space and
Astronautical Science) launched a space engineering satellite
HITEN (MUSES-A Mission) from Kagoshima Space Center, Japan (JKCS)
into a highly elliptical orbit around the Earth with perigees
between some thousand and 100,000 km, and apogees between 300,000
and 1.53 million km. The Munich Dust Counter (MDC) is a cosmic
dust experiment on board the spacecraft HITEN. After a short
introduction describing the experiment setup and the measuring
principle, the results of two years of operation of the MDC will
be discussed. From these micrometeoroid measurements a summary of
the following results will be presented: (1) Determination of the
mass, velocity, and angular distribution of cosmic dust particles
and beta meteoroids in the Earth-Moon system. (2) Detection of
pro- and retrograde beta meteoroids in the solar system. (3)
Accurate measurements of the cumulative particle flux of cosmic
dust particles and beta meteoroids. (4) Evidence of different
types of cosmic dust particles like apex particles, beta
meteoroids, and particles with high inclinations. (5) Focussing
and defocussing effects by the Earth and the Moon. (6) Evidence
of swarms, groups, and random particles. Enormous variations of
the instantaneous particle fluxes and impact rates of
micrometeoroids. (7) No significant indications for stable dust
clouds near the Lagrangian points L4 and L5 (Kordylewsky-clouds).
(8) Indications of the existence of interstellar particles. (9)
Finally the spatial distribution of 351 cosmic dust particles is
shown in geocentric and heliocentric coordinate systems. The
directional distribution is also given, showing the different
populations of cosmic dust particles.
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MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry