The SELENE-Kaguya mission was designed to create a detailed topographical model of the Moon. The mission carried two small satellites: Okina and Ouna, which mean “honorable elderly man” and “honorable elderly woman,” respectively.

ARTEMIS is the first mission to orbit the Moon's Lagrangian points—points on either side of the Moon where the Moon and Earth's gravity balance perfectly.

NASA's ARTEMIS mission (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun) is made up of two probes: P1 and P2. They were originally part of the successful THEMIS mission that orbited Earth and studied the aurora. NASA redirected the two probes to the Moon.

SMART, which stands for Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology was a techonology test of new solar-electric propulsion, communication techniques and miniataurized science instruments.

NASA's Lunar Prospector orbited the Moon for almost 19 months to map its surface composition and to look for polar ice. The probe found evidence suggesting water ice at both poles.

Hiten (originally called Muses-A) was an ISAS (Japanese Space Agency) Earth orbiting satellite designed primarily to test and verify technologies for future lunar and planetary missions.

Luna 24 was the third Soviet attempt to land at the site of a large mass concentration on the Moon, obtain a soil sample down to about 6.6 feet (2 meters) beneath the lunar surface, and return it to Earth.

Luna 23 was to drill 2.5 meters below the lunar surface (compared to the 0.3-m depth of the cores sampled by Luna 16 and 20) and return a sample of the soil to Earth.

In addition to its primary mission of surface photography, Luna 22 also performed investigations to determine the chemical composition of the lunar surface, recorded meteoroid activity, searched for a lunar magnetic field, measured solar and cosmic radiation flux, and continued studies of the irregular magnetic field.

The Radio Astronomy Explorer B (RAE-B) mission was the second of a pair of RAE satellites. It was placed into lunar orbit to provide radio astronomical measurements of the planets, the sun, and the galaxy over the frequency range of 25 kHz to 13.1 MHz.