Comparison of Asian national space programs to fuel future energy demands in Asia. All three main Asian space powers plan to send men to the Moon in the distant future and have already sent lunar probes. Japan was the first Asian country to launch a lunar probe. The Hiten (Japanese: "flying angel") spacecraft (known before the launch as MUSES-A), built by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of Japan, was launched on 24 January 1990. In many ways, the mission did not go as was planned. Kaguya, the second Japanese lunar orbiter spacecraft, was launched on 14 September 2007. China launched its first lunar probe,
Explorer 10 Explorer 10 Explorer 10 (also known as Explorer X or P14) was an American Earth-orbital satellite that investigated Earth's magnetic fields and nearby plasma. Launched on March 25, 1961, it was an early mission in the Explorer program and was the first satellite to measure the "shock wave" generated by a solar flare. The objective was to investigate the magnetic fields and plasma as the spacecraft passed through Earth's magnetosphere and into cislunar space. The satellite was launched into a highly-elliptical orbit and was spin-stabilized with a spin period of 0.548 s. The direction of its spin vector was 71