TAOS, NEW MEXICO -- Earth's scuffed up and trampled Moon is once again targeted for high-tech visitors. Robotic spacecraft from several nations, as well as NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense, will be first to chalk up lunar return mileage.

All the planned new attention -- close-up picture sessions, hits by pinpricking penetrators, radar sweeps of the cratered terrain, and even snag-and-bag rock collecting by automated machinery -- puts the Moon back on the exploration map.

Armed with new data, human visitors may once again visit Earth’s only natural satellite, this time to survey the scene and set up a permanent science outpost.

Space experts outlined their approaches at The Moon Beyond 2002: Next Steps in Lunar Science and Exploration, held here Sept. 12-14. The meeting was hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Furthermore, the Moon is a natural space station.

There is growing interest in the Moon, not only for scientific and commercial benefit, but also for its military utility as a propellant storehouse.

Getting back to the Moon via NASA means, for now, a robotic probing of the Aitken basin at the south pole. Such a project is a likely candidate for the space agency's New Frontiers class of spacecraft. That program could cough up some $650 million to bankroll an Aitken "dig, stash and dash" sample-return lander effort, perhaps taking place by 2009.

"We need a program, not a one-shot deal," James Head, planetary geologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said at the conference. "We're entering a new phase of exploration…and the Moon is the place."

NASA has company in its desire to reactivate American lunar exploration.

Several Department of Defense (DoD) organizations -- such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Naval Research Laboratory -- are exploring new technologies ideal for future lunar science and exploration objectives.

"The DoD is embarking on a rather major program to develop technologies for microsatellites and the ability to get them into space," said U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Simon Worden, deputy director of operations for the U.S. Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. Several small satellites could be directed to the Moon, to orbit well as land on it. Such an effort could be accomplished in a few years time, Worden said.

These ultra-small spacecraft would ride their way into geosynchronous transfer orbit as a secondary payload on some craft with another primary mission. The tiny probes would then make a propulsive beeline to the Moon. Trip time to the Moon: some 97 days.

"We think we can take a microsatellite and land in some location of the Moon with a useful payload," Worden said. "The total cost per mission, once we carry out the development of this, is in the $10 million to $15 million range per mission. This could open up a whole new era. Clearly the Moon and near Earth objects, the asteroids, are primary targets of this."

"With a microsatellite, you can get very close to the Moon and get very high resolution," Spudis said. One scenario is to use side-looking radar to gain new views of the surface.

"You would actually image the dark areas you can't see into," Spudis told SPACE.com. "You could completely map every spot near the Moon's South Pole. But more importantly, side-looking radar is a great way to look for ice."

There will be a several spacecraft headed moonward next year.

SMART-1 will rely on solar electric primary propulsion.

The craft is slated to fly in March 2003 as an Ariane-5 auxiliary payload, said Bernard Foing, ESA's SMART-1 Project Scientist. The probe's cruise to the Moon will take 15 to 17 months depending on the precise launch date.

Europe's entrée into lunar exploration via SMART-1 is part of a larger roadmap, one that includes an "international robot village." These automatons could prepare the Moon for follow-on human explorers, Foing said.

A "penetrating" look at the Moon is on tap for Japan's Lunar-A probe, to be lofted in August-September of next year, said Hitoshi Mizutani, a professor at the Division of Planetary Science at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) -- the core institution dedicated to space and astronautical science research in Japan.

The ISAS Lunar-A is to be boosted into space using an M-V launch vehicle from Kagoshima Space Center, near Uchinoura Japan (at the southeast end of Kyushu). Taking about a year to arrive at the Moon, the spacecraft then tosses off two missile-shaped, instrument-loaded penetrators.

Once free of the main spacecraft, each penetrator will fire a solid-rocket motor to cancel out their orbital velocity around the Moon. Gas jets align the penetrators nose-first as they free-fall toward the lunar surface. One device is to hit the Moon's near side, the other on the far side, Mizutani said.

Each penetrator is packed with about 29-pounds (13-kilograms) of temperature sensors, an accelerometer, thermal conductivity probes, and two short-period seismometers. At the moment of impact, the penetrators will experience a g-force greater than 6,000 (1g is the normal force of gravity felt on Earth).

Testing of the needle-nosed gear has shown they should come to rest at a depth of 3-feet to 10 feet (one to three meters).

"It's a very high-impact encounter," Mizutani said.

Each penetrator has a lifetime of one-year at a minimum. But that depends on how much seismic activity, or "moonquakes," they detect. Data gleaned by the penetrator seismometers -- approximately 5 times as sensitive as those deployed by Apollo astronauts -- and other information is sent upwards to the Lunar-A spacecraft in lunar orbit, for relay back to Earth.

Mizutani detailed another Japanese Moon project called the Selenological and Engineering Explorer, or SELENE.

ISAS and the National Space Development Agency of Japan are working together to launch SELENE in 2005. At present, it's the largest lunar program since Apollo, Mizutani said. This spacecraft is five times larger than Lunar-A and carries two subsatellites built for release in lunar orbit.

The primary objective of SELENE is to study the origin and evolution of the Moon. For one, it will globally map the Moon's topography during its pole to pole touring. The probe is to be outfitted with a high-definition television camera system that beams video back to home audiences.