Moon no longer mysterious thanks to science

With a stationary front engulfing the nation, the tsuyu rainy season is here--a welcome season for rice paddies and rain-loving frogs. The weekly weather forecast on TV does not show too many rain icons yet, but I imagine I will soon get into the habit of looking up at the sky in the morning to decide whether it will rain.

But raindrops are not the only things that are pulled by gravity to suddenly fall out of the sky. Last week, about 100 tadpoles reportedly "rained" on Nanao, Ishikawa Prefecture. Nobody knows how these rice paddy denizens ascended to the sky in the first place.

According to reports, a man in a parking lot heard a pattering sound. When he turned around to look, tadpoles were strewn all over the place. The same phenomenon also occurred in Hakusan, about 80 kilometers away, where about 30 tadpoles were found. And in another town, about 10 small crucian carp apparently fell out of the sky on Tuesday.

In 2000, a "downpour" of small fish occurred in eastern Britain, blanketing the garden of a private home. In this case, a waterspout had sucked schools of fish out of the sea. Tornadoes and waterspouts are known to cause "showers" of frogs and small tortoises, but this does not explain the phenomena in Ishikawa Prefecture. Could those creatures have been disgorged by birds in flight?

While some things fall out of the sky indiscriminately, others do so in a controlled manner. The Japanese moon explorer Kaguya impacted the lunar surface on Thursday and ended its mission. Launched 21 months ago, it beamed back high-precision images of the moon's surface and the rising and setting of the "full Earth" on the lunar horizon. Thinking of all the hard work Kaguya must have done for us, I murmured my thanks.

The last job for Kaguya's project team was to control the explorer's impact and let it happen on the side of the moon that is visible from Earth. When signals from Kaguya ceased on cue, applause erupted from the team. Kaguya carried messages from about 410,000 people, publicly invited to make their wishes upon the moon. I am sure the messages were delivered safely to the Moon Rabbit--the creature that lives on the moon in East Asian folklore.

Amayo no tsuki, which literally means "the moon on a rainy night," is an old Japanese idiom denoting a person or an object one cannot actually see and can only picture in one's mind. There are still many unknowns in life that defy our imagination. The moon used to be a foremost example, but the power of science has brought it a lot closer to us.

When the moon peeks out of the clouds on a drizzly night, I think I will try to remember Kaguya, the hard worker that left a treasure trove of valuable data and disappeared silently.

--The Asahi Shimbun, June 12(IHT/Asahi: June 13,2009)