re japanese moon landing in article c l xt iqd zoo toronto edu henry zoo toronto edu henry spencer writes in article c kys c r panix com dannyb panix com daniel burstein writes a short story in the newspaper a few days ago made some sort of mention about how the japanese using what sounded like a gravity assist had just managed to crash or crash land a package on the moon their hiten engineering test mission spent a while in a highly eccentric earth orbit doing lunar flybys and then was inserted into lunar orbit using some very tricky gravity assist like maneuvering this meant that it would crash on the moon eventually since there is no such thing as a stable lunar orbit as far as anyone knows and i believe i recall hearing recently that it was about to happen the gravity maneuvering that was used was to exploit fuzzy regions these are described by the inventor as exploiting the second order perturbations in a three body system the probe was launched into this region for the earth moon sun system where the perturbations affected it in such a way as to allow it to go into lunar orbit without large expenditures of fuel to slow down the idea is that natural objects sometimes get captured without expending fuel we ll just find the trajectory that makes it possible the originator of the technique said that nasa wasn t interested but that japan was because their probe was small and couldn t hold a lot of fuel for deceleration this from an issue of science news or the planetary report i believe about months ago raymond l swartz jr rls uihepa hep uiuc edu i read the newspaper today and was amazed that in hours five billion people could accomplish so little
