Japan plans 2 more moon missions

Japan plans to carry out two more missions to the moon and then collaborate internationally to put a man on the lunar surface, a Japanese space scientist said Thursday.
Asia's biggest economy this month successfully launched Kaguya (or Selene), its first lunar orbiter, stealing a march over China and India which are planning unmanned missions of their own to the moon.
Japan's next mission in 2012 will aim at landing a robot on the moon's surface, followed by one in 2018 that will seek to return successfully to earth, said Manabu Kato, chief scientist overseeing the Kaguya project.
"We are also discussing human exploration but we expect international collaboration" in a manned mission, Kato told reporters on the sidelines of a global space conference in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad.
Human exploration could be followed by human colonies on the moon, he said.
Cooperation between nations for lunar exploration should be modelled on the international space station, he said.
The space station is a research laboratory being assembled in orbit by the US, Canada, Russia, Japan and Europe.
The world's space agencies discussed missions to the moon and even to Mars at a five-day conference in Hyderabad that ended yesterday, amid a renewed surge of interest in space exploration.