2001: William Sheehan & Thomas Dobbins - Epic Moon. The best book on the history of the Moon. Learn about the peculiar people who have devoted themselves to the Moon and the work they did - fascinating!.

2001: Patrick Moore - Patrick Moore on the Moon. A pleasant introduction to the Moon, and an obvious descendent of all his Moon books since 1952. Two dust jackets exist - I like this one best!

2001: Donald Beattie - Taking Science to the Moon. This is a little known personal story of the political, engineering and occasional scientific considerations cocnering science done during the Apollo mission. I had never heard of Beattie before but I am glad he helped make the good decisions and wrote this book. Read it!

2001: David Whitehouse - The Moon - A Biography. This is a well-written book with many perspectives about the Moon beyond the mere scientific. There are many anecdotes relating to the Moon that I have never heard before - but the pleasure of learning new things is sullied by the scientific errors. Here is my Amazon.com review - which, itself, has been “rubbished” by Whitehead’s admirers.

2001: Euromoon - proposed European Space Agency project to land a spacecraft on the rim of the crater Aitken near the lunar south pole. This point is in perpetual sunlight and thus could provide continuous solar energy for a mission to look for putative lunar polar ices. See Nature, 6 Nov., 1997 for a few more details. The mission never happened! (And Aitken is not near the pole!)

2003: Charles A. Wood - The Modern Moon: A Personal Perspective. Great Book! Order at upper left on any LPOD page!

2003 -2006: SMART-1. This ESA spacecraft was developed as proof of concept of various technologies and carries three scientific instruments. Its electical propulsion system required 15 months (arriving Nov 2004) for the spacecraft to reach the Moon. SMART-1 has acquired thousands of lunar images with resolutions of 30 to 80 m (depending on altitude), but only a handful have been released. SMART-1 crashed into the Moon in fall, 2006, providing a controlled impact whose flash was observed in Hawaii.

2003: Jean Lacroux & Christian Legrand - Discover the Moon. Cheery introduction to the Moon - features images and maps in two orientations, for observers with inverting telescopes (newtonians) and east-west switching scopes (schmidt-cassegrains and refractors with diagonals). Here is my review

2004: Peter Grego -Moon Observer’s Guide. Another new introductory guide to the Moon, at a higher level than Lacraoux and Legrand. Here is my review.

2006: Editors: BL Jolliff, MA Wieczorek, CK Shearer & CR Neal - New Views of the Moon. A massive, 2002 era scientific summary of the Moon written by dozens of luanar scientists. My mini-review is here.

2004: Charles A. Wood - Lunar 100 Card. In the April 2004 issue of Sky & Telescope I introduced the Lunar 100 - a Messier list for the Moon. This is a convenient card with a map on one side and the L100 list on the other. The article and map are available online.

2006: Thierry Legault & Serge Brunier - The New Atlas of the Moon. This is the most attractive atlas of the Moon I’ve ever seen. Like Michael Light’s Full Moon, the cover is a rich black and the photos are well-reproduced at a large scale inside. Too big for use at the telescope and too undetailed for a comprehensive reference, it is to be enjoyed as an art book. Here is my mini-review of the French edition.

2007: SELENE - (Selenological and Engineering Explorer) proposed complex Japanese mission, including an orbiter to map farside and study magnetic field, a lander, and a high altitude data relay satellite; planned lander canceled in 1997. See Science, 1 Nov. 1996 for a few details. In June 1998, the NEC Corp. was named as prime contractor, and a scaled back mission now includes a remote sensing orbiter, lander and a data relay satellite. SELENE 2 will be a lunar rover, and SELENE 3 lunar surface telescope. Space News June 13-24, 1998. Selene is scheduled to lauch in the summer of 2007. The Terrain Camera will acquire stereoscopic images at 10 m resolution. Hopefully, there will be funding to derive a high res digital terrain map of the entire Moon.

2007-8: Chandrayaan-I. India is completing an advanced spacecraft to be launched to the moon in 2007 or 2008. It will conduct high resolution chemical, mineralogical and topographic mapping. The Terrain Mapping Camera will have 5 m resolution, and the topographic map will have an accuracy of 10 m. These are products that have been needed for decades! Here are details.

2008-2030: Chinese Moon Exploration - Three decades of scientific mapping and construction of a manned lunar base announced as general plans by China in March, 1998.

2010: MoonLITE and MoonRAKER - Britain is investigating the possibility of sending small spacecraft to the Moon. MoonLITE would implant four penetrators (perhaps at the poles and on the farside - I bet the South Pole-Aithken basin) and MoonRAKER is some sort of rover (or lander in other dispatches) to search for “suitable sites for bases.” One report says it would date samples on the Moon - this is an almost impossible task because of the need to carefully prepare samples.

Almost certainly more lunar missions from the Japanese, the Chinese, the Indians, commercial companies and hopefully the Americans!