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TOKYO (AP) -- Fresh off the successful launch of its first spy satellites, Japan is now preparing a more ambitious, and less controversial, mission: to bring home the first space rocks since U.S. astronauts gathered samples from the moon over 30 years ago.
"This is by far our most complex mission to date,'' said Junichiro Kawaguchi, who is heading the mission for Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. "There are many difficulties that could bring down the chances of success.''
For starters, Japan has its sights set on a much smaller -- and far more distant -- target than the moon.
If all goes well, Kawaguchi said, the unmanned MUSES-C probe will make three one-second touch-and-go contacts with 1998 SF36, a tiny asteroid some 180 million miles (290 million kilometers) away from Earth, and bring back a gram or so of its surface.
Muses would be the world's first two-way trip to an asteroid. A NASA probe collected data for two weeks from the surface of the Manhattan-sized asteroid Eros in 2001, but it did not return with physical samples.
"No probe has brought back extraterrestrial samples since the Apollo program'' in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kawaguchi said.
Japanese space officials have been encouraged by five consecutive successful launches of their domestically developed H-2A rocket, which they hope will become a competitive commercial launch vehicle.
The latest H-2A, which lifted off in March, put two spy satellites into orbit.
But the MUSES-C launch, scheduled for May 9 from a pad on an island in southern Japan, will mark Japan's first space exploration mission in more than three years.
Getting off the ground hasn't been easy.
The failure of an M-5 rocket to put the last space probe into orbit in February 2000 forced planners to postpone the Muses-C launch, and aim it at a different asteriod than originally intended. A glitch in its altitude regulating system caused a further delay, and swelling costs prompted NASA to shelve a project to build a tiny, wheeled robot for the probe.
Undaunted, mission planners now intend to gather surface samples from the asteroid in June 2005 and parachute them in a re-entry capsule to a range near the southern Australia town of Woomera two years later.
Little is known about asteroids.
Muses' football-shaped target is only 2,300 feet (690 meters) long and 1,000 feet (300 meters) wide, and has a gravitational pull only one-one-hundred-thousandth of Earth's. Though it will take MUSES-C about two years to get there, the asteroid is among the closest neighbors to Earth other than the moon.
Muses' first mission will be a three-month survey of the asteroid with cameras and infrared imaging gear from an altitude of about 12 miles (19 kilometers). It will move in close enough to fire a small bullet into the asteroid and collect the ejected fragments in a funnel-like device.
It won't be coming back with much -- the amount of material planners hope to capture wouldn't even fill a teaspoon.
"People often ask why just one gram," said Kawaguchi. "For us, that's a lot. It's enough for tests and analysis."
A target marker the size and shape of a grapefruit will guide the probe to its sample collection sites.
To boost public awareness of Japan's space program, a campaign to collect names to be sent into space with the probe was held over the Internet. Though the campaign fell short of its 1 million goal, 877,490 names have been etched on an aluminum-foil wrapper around the target marker.
Roughly half of them are Americans; Japanese account for about 40 percent, according to the Japan Planetary Society, which sponsored the campaign.
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