The Hiten spacecraft (ひてん, Japanese pronunciation: [çiteɴ]), given the English name Celestial Maiden[2] and known before launch as MUSES-A (Mu Space Engineering Spacecraft A), part of the MUSES Program, was built by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of Japan and launched on January 24, 1990.

[6] Hiten was to be placed into a highly elliptical Earth orbit with an apogee of 476,000 km, which would swing past the Moon.

[7] After the eighth swing-by, Hiten successfully demonstrated the aerobraking technique on March 19, 1991, flying by the Earth at an altitude of 125.5 km over the Pacific at 11.0 km/s.

After that, Hiten was put into a looping orbit which passed through the L4 and L5 Lagrange points to look for trapped dust particles: the then-tentatively observed Kordylewski clouds.

The only scientific instrument on Hiten was the Munich Dust Counter (MDC); no increase over background levels was observed.