Tsukuba (つくば市, Tsukuba-shi) is a city located in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. As of January 1, 2024, the city had an estimated population of 256,526 in 121,001 households and a population density of 900 persons per km. The percentage of the population aged over 65 was 20.3%. The total area of the city is 283.72 square kilometres (109.54 sq mi). It is known as the location of the Tsukuba Science City (筑波研究学園都市, Tsukuba Kenkyū Gakuen Toshi), a planned science park developed in the 1960s.
The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (国土地理院, Kokudo Chiri-in), or GSI, is the national institution responsible for surveying and mapping the national land of Japan. The former name of the organization from 1949 until March 2010 was Geographical Survey Institute; despite the rename, it retains the same initials. It is an extraordinary organ of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. Its main offices are situated in Tsukuba City of Ibaraki Prefecture.
It also runs a museum, situated in Tsukuba, the Science Museum of Map and Survey.
The US Orbital Segment (USOS) is the name given to the components of the International Space Station (ISS) constructed and operated by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The segment consists of eleven pressurized components and various external elements, almost all of which were delivered by the Space Shuttle.
The segment is monitored and controlled from various mission control centers around the world including Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany and Tsukuba Space Center in Tsukuba, Japan. However, it depends on the Russian Orbital Segment for essential flight control, orbital station-keeping and life support systems.
The University of Tsukuba (筑波大学, Tsukuba daigaku) is a national research university located in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.
The university has 28 college clusters and schools with around 16,500 students (as of 2014). The main Tsukuba campus covers an area of 258 hectares (636 acres), making it the second largest single campus in Japan.
There are a small number of municipalities in Japan whose names are written in hiragana or katakana, together known as kana, rather than kanji as is traditional for Japanese place names. Many city names written in kana have kanji equivalents that are either phonetic manyōgana, or whose kanji are outside of the jōyō kanji. Others, such as Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, are taken from localities or landmarks whose names continue to be written in kanji. Another cause is the merger of multiple cities, one of which had the original kanji — in such cases, the hiragana place name is used to create a new identity for the merged city, distinct from the constituent city with the same kanji name.
The Belle experiment was a particle physics experiment conducted by the Belle Collaboration, an international collaboration of more than 400 physicists and engineers, at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. The experiment ran from 1999 to 2010.
The Belle detector was located at the collision point of the asymmetric-energy electron–positron collider, KEKB. Belle at KEKB together with the BaBar experiment at the PEP-II accelerator at SLAC were known as the B-factories as they collided electrons with positrons at the center-of-momentum energy equal to the mass of the ϒ(4S) resonance which decays to pairs of B mesons.