Nihon Matsuri — The Japan Festival at the Bern History Museum

Japan Festival: Off to Space with JAXA and UniBE!

Saturday, 12.09.2026 - Sunday, 13.09.2026


© Bern History Museum

Experience Japan in Bern! The NIHON MATSURI – The Grand Japan Festival is back at the Bern History Museum for a weekend full of Japanese traditions, culture, food, and entertainment. This year, the University of Bern together with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency JAXA joins the festivities! Don't miss out on a fascinating talk by Masaki Fujimoto, Director General of ISAS/JAXA on Saturday. You can also visit us at our booth on both days, meet space researchers and learn more about meteorites. Join us for an exciting weekend this September!

Event organizer: Bern History Museum, Embassy of Japan in Switzerland
Speaker: Masaki Fujimoto (ISAS/JAXA), Raphael Marschall (UniBE)
Date: 12.09.2026 - 13.09.2026
Time: 10:00 - 17:00
Locality: Oriental Collection Hall / Tent Outside
Bern Historical Museum
Helvetiaplatz 5
3005 Bern
Registration: Tickets sold by Bern Historical Museum (sales begin mid-August)
Characteristics: open to the public
chargeable

UniBE and JAXA @ Nihon Matsuri

JAXA's Way of Space Research

Saturday, 12 September 2026, 14:45–15:15h | Oriental Collection Hall

Step into the cosmos and explore Japan's and Switzerland's cutting-edge contributions to space exploration with Raphael Marschall from the University of Bern and our special guest Masaki Fujimoto, Director General of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science ISAS at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency JAXA. From chasing a comet with the European Space Agency ESA and JAXA mission Comet Interceptor to returning a sample from the Martian moon Phobos with JAXA's MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission, they invite you on a journey that highlights the technology, science, and imagination that fuel humanity's quest to understand the universe.

Off to Space with JAXA and the University of Bern!

Saturday–Sunday, 12–13 September 2026, 10:00–17:00h | Tent Outside Museum

Ready to examine meteorites, explore asteroids and discover space missions? Visit the booth of the Japan Aerospace Agency JAXA and the University of Bern to meet researchers involved in exciting space missions. Discover a model of the MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) space probe, a JAXA mission to Phobos and Deimos, unexplored moons of Mars. Put yourself in the shoes of researchers from the University of Bern that are right now building the CHANCES camera for the joint ESA-JAXA mission RAMSES to the asteroid Apophis!

Speaker Profiles

Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (ISAS/JAXA)

Dr. Masaki Fujimoto, Director General ISAS / Vice President JAXA

Dr. Fujimoto joined JAXA in 2006 as a Professor in the Department of Solar System Sciences. He played a key role in establishing the framework that enabled Japanese scientists to participate in ESA’s BepiColombo mission to Mercury and the JUICE mission to the Jovian system. In December 2020, he supported the recovery operation of the Hayabusa2 sample return capsule in Australia under the challenging conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is also one of the founding members of the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission, a mission to return samples from Phobos, one of the Martian moons.

Division of Space Research and Planetary Sciences, University of Bern

Prof. Raphael Marschall, Associate Professor of Experimental Physics

Raphael Marschall is a planetary physicist and Associate Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Bern. Previously, he has worked at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), the Laboratoire J.-L. Lagrange of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice (France), and the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder (CO, USA). His primary scientific interest is understanding the formation and evolution of our Solar System. He studies and analyses data acquired by interplanetary spacecraft. In particular, he has used data sets collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) spacecraft Rosetta to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, NASA’s Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter, and the forthcoming Comet Interceptor mission to a dynamically new comet, to understand the evolution of small bodies. Recently, he has also focused on understanding how planetesimals form in the early protoplanetary disk.