Japan's Asteroid Mission Heralds a New Space Race

A Japanese rocket has blasted off on one of the most ambitious missions ever undertaken by space engineers. The tiny Muses-C probe will travel 400 million miles to return a piece of primordial rock left over from the solar system's creation five billion years ago.

Scientists are desperate to get their hands on the planets' building blocks but their attempts to get hold of bits of comet and asteroid have come unstuck.

Last August, Nasa's Contour spacecraft - intended to be the first probe to take samples from a comet's core - blew up. Similarly Rosetta, a mission to the comet Wirtanen, had to be cancelled in January after its launcher, Europe's Ariane 5 rocket, suffered a series of major failures.

But now Japan looks set to succeed where the West has failed, revealing a startling new trend in space science - the rise of Eastern rocket powers.

Apart from its asteroid chaser - which will take four years to travel to and from 1998 SF36, a tiny football-size object 180 million miles from Earth - Japan is preparing to send a probe, Nozomi, into orbit round Mars in January and also has plans to launch an orbiting observatory to study X-rays emitted by black holes as well as attempting two missions to the Moon.

At the same time, its great rival China has been vigorously building up its space programme and announced a few weeks ago that it will launch an astronaut, or taikonaut - taken from taikong, the Chinese word for space - later this year on the country's Shenzhou V spacecraft.

Nor is this Eastern rivalry confined to China and Japan. Earlier this year, India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told a stunned conference in Bombay that his scientists 'were now talking of sending a man into space'. The country's space agency also unveiled an ambitious plan to send a probe to the Moon in 2007, with the prospect of following up with a manned lander years later.

The West - which has enjoyed a virtual monopoly over space missions in recent years following the collapse of the Soviet Union - is now facing serious rivalry from the East.

The Muses-C craft, which is scheduled to return less than an ounce of asteroid rock, may be tiny but its ambitious goals and technical sophistication suggest a new space race is about to begin.