Japanese Lunar Exploration Program km on opposite sides of the lunar body. The penetrators were to have been braked by a small rocket at an altitude of 25 km, then free fall to the surface. They were designed to withstand a collision speed of 330 meters per second to deeply penetrate the lunar regolith. Once the penetrators are deployed, the LUNAR-A spacecraft was mission-planned to maneuver to an orbital altitude of 200 km above the lunar surface. The craft was to have carried a monochromatic imaging camera with a resolution of 30 m. It was to be Japan's first large scale lunar probe. (Hiten
Explorer 18 Explorer 18 Explorer 18, also called IMP-A, IMP 1 and S-74, was an American satellite launched as part of Explorers program. Explorer 18 was launched on 27 November 1963 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States, with Delta rocket. Explorer 18 was the first satellite of the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. Explorer 18 was a solar cell and chemical-battery powered spacecraft instrumented for interplanetary and distant magnetospheric studies of energetic particles, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and plasmas. Initial spacecraft parameters included a local time of apogee of 1020 hours, a spin rate of 22 rpm, and a spin direction of 115° right