Abstract

On 10 April (UTC) 1993, MUSES-A (HITEN) satellite ceased its mission by hard landing on the moon's surface. After its launch on 24 January 1990, HITEN successfully carried out every mission which included 10 lunar swingbys, insertion of a sub-satellite into an orbit around the moon, cis-lunar aerobraking experiments (two times), excursion to the Lagrangian points (L4 and L5) of the Earth-Moon system, orbiting the HITEN spacecraft itself around the moon, and landing on the moon surface. During its mission life of more than three years, the spacecraft (197 kg st launch) flew through space ranging from 120 km to 1,538,000 km from the earth at the expense of only 42 kg of fuel. In this paper, a summary of the HITEN's three years mission is described.