Credit: NASA
Chinese hope
Chang'e-1 is the first in a series of three Chinese spacecraft; Chang'e-2 will be a lander with a rover, and Chang'e-3 will return Moon samples to Earth. The Chinese hope someday to send humans to build a lunar outpost, but for now they're focusing on gathering knowledge and experience step-by-step.
Later this year India plans to send its own Chandrayaan-1 probe to orbit the Moon. In Sanskrit, 'Chandrayaan' means Moon craft. A NASA-sponsored instrument, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, will ride along and use an infrared spectrometer to survey the lunar terrain and give us a highly detailed picture of mineral locations. Chandrayaan-2, planned for 2010 or 2011, will place a robotic rover on the Moon. The rover will wheel around on the lunar surface, pick up samples of soil or rocks, do chemical analysis, and send the data to the spacecraft orbiting above.
The U.S. space agency is very much a part of this Great Moon Rush. Later this year, the agency plans to launch the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a spacecraft bristling with instruments to map the Moon and locate key resources ranging from water to building materials.
"The LRO mission will provide the best resolution images – at about 50 cm per pixel – out of all the instruments currently headed to the Moon," says NASA's Cohen. "This means we will be able to see rocks that are about two feet (60 cm) in diameter. This lets us look at potential landing sites to assess the terrain and hazards for a human return. LRO will also have an instrument that flies 'tissue-equivalent plastic' to assess radiation damage to human skin."
NASA's GRAIL
Even further into the future, in 2011 NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, will peer deep inside the Moon to reveal its anatomy and history. This mission, part of NASA's Discovery Program, will fly twin spacecraft around the Moon for several months to measure its gravity field in great detail and answer questions about how Earth and other planets in our solar system formed.
Both LRO and GRAIL will provide valuable information to help plan for the return of NASA's manned Moon missions in the next decade.
Though the U.S. Apollo missions have already sent many people to the Moon, NASA says they didn't stay long enough to do much more than scratch the surface, literally. The pull to return is strong.
"Many nations with emerging space programs have the Moon in their sights. There will be a renaissance in lunar scientific exploration in the next several decades that the US will not want to miss," says Wesley Huntress, lunar advocate and director emeritus of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington DC. "The pull of the Moon to emerging space programs around the world can be a catalyst for a new era of space exploration; one of international cooperation."
No return would be complete without Russia, though, one of the original lunar pioneers. After racing to the Moon in the 1970s, the USSR virtually abandoned lunar exploration. Russian scientists nevertheless continued to look longingly toward that silver orb in the night sky, recognizing its great worth for research.
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