Hiten (originally called Muses-A) was an ISAS (Japanese Space Agency) Earth-orbiting satellite designed primarily to test and verify technologies for future lunar and planetary missions. The spacecraft carried a small satellite named Hagoromo which was released into orbit around the Moon. Hiten itself was put into a highly elliptical Earth orbit that passed by the Moon ten times during the mission, which ended when Hiten intentionally crashed into the Moon on 10 April 1993.

Hiten was a cylindrically shaped spacecraft, 1.4 m in diameter and 0.8 m high. The small polyhedral-shaped Hagoromo lunar orbiter was mounted on top of the spacecraft. The fully fueled mass of Hiten was 197 kg, this included 42 kg of hydrazine fuel and the 12 kg Hagoromo orbiter. Solar cells on the cylindrical surface of the spacecraft supplied the power requirement of 110 W, backed up by a small onboard battery. The spacecraft was spin-stabilized at 10 - 20.5 rpm.

Spacecraft propulsion and attitude control was provided by eight 23-N and four 3-N hydrazine thrusters, two spin-type Sun aspect sensors, a star scanner, a steerable horizon crossing indicator, three accelerometers, a nutation damper, and control electronics including an onboard processor. An optical navigation subsystem, consisting of two CCD image detectors to detect the Moon and bright stars was also tested.

Communications were accomplished through a medium gain collinear array antenna in both X-band and S-band protruding from the bottom surface of the spacecraft and two cross dipole omnidirectional low gain antennas in S-band only, one mounted on the top and one on the bottom. Downlink is via onboard X-band and S-band transmitters, each with two power levels. Two receivers are used for S-band uplink, one connected to the low-gain antennas and the other to the medium-gain antenna.