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Voyage to the world of Le Petit Prince -- What we can learn from asteroids --
The Little Prince

Exactly one year after his arrival, the Little Prince returned to his asteroid after it came back to the exact location from where he had arrived. It is, however, a bit of a strange setting if I place a piece of reality into this fancy non-fiction world. An asteroid cannot come back to the exact same location relative to the Earth in a year, because an asteroid normally circulates around the sun at a different period of revolution than that of the Earth. For its period to be exactly the same in one year as that of the Earth, however, his asteroid must come back to the same location, and if that's the case, this asteroid is very peculiar and exists very close to the Earth's orbit. In other words, the asteroid of the Little Prince was an NEO.


Actually, the asteroid Itokawa is one of the NEOs that comes close to Earth. The most recent approach was on June 26, 2004, at 0.01 of an astronomical unit (or about 1.5 million km) to the Earth, and the previous one was 0.04 of an astronomical unit (or about 6 million km) on March 29, 2001. Itokawa approaches the Earth every three years, so it is obviously not the asteroid of the Little Prince, but we have also discovered some asteroids whose period of revolution is about one year. One of them may be his home.


Diagram 8: Successfully evading the danger by using human wisdom, Computer Graphics by Kota Nishiyama of JSGA.

Then, the Little Prince may live unexpectedly near us and always watch us. He may warn us that mankind could become extinct if we are too selfish. Maybe this is the reason why Antoine de Saint-Exupery chose the asteroid as the home of the Prince.


The Little Prince learned one thing from the fox on Earth. That is, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." In the current dramatically changing era, those words have very significant meaning, and I would especially like the younger generations to fully understand their implications. For those of you who are not young, I hope you maintain your flexibility not to become adults like those in The Little Prince who mistook the prince's drawing of a boa constrictor for a hat.

'The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen' The Little Prince. (*1) (c) Akemi Ogura 2005


(*1) Translated from the original Le Petit Prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupery by Katherine Woods, published by A Harvest/HBJ Book
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Makoto Yoshikawa Associate Professor,Department of Space Information and Energy, ISAS Mr. Yoshikawa was born in the city of Tochigi, Tochigi Prefecture, in 1962. He graduated from Tokyo University majoring in Astronomy at the Faculty of Science, and acquired a Doctor of Science from the Graduate School of Tokyo University. After accepting the posts of fellowship researcher at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and senior researcher at the then Communications Research Laboratory of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (currently the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology), he started working for the ISAS in 1998. His major is celestial mechanics, more specifically the analysis of orbits of small bodies in the solar system such as asteroids and comets. He is currently also engaging in research to determine the orbits of satellites and spacecraft.