Also in 2008, India will likely choose the target year for a human spaceflight to the moon, said G. Madhavan Nair, head of the Indian Space Research Organisation.
"It will take seven or eight years," Nair said. "We are in the process of sharpening our ideas."
Despite more than four decades of lunar missions, space scientists still lack definitive answers to questions about the moon's origin, the minerals it contains and whether it has water that could support human life.
"There is a lot more known about the moon, but even after the current round of lunar missions, you will still have more questions," said Indian scientist U.R. Rao, who did pioneering work on space launch vehicles.
Mineral samples from the moon contained abundant quantities of helium 3, a variant of the gas used in lasers and refrigerators as well as to blow up balloons, and space experts say that may offer a solution to the earth's energy shortages.
Technology for converting helium 3 to energy is still far away, but spacefaring nations are already talking about a permanent human presence on the moon and looking beyond to Mars and more distant planets.
President George W. Bush in 2004 announced an ambitious plan for the United States to return to the moon by 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for manned missions to Mars and beyond.
NASA aims to put a man on Mars by 2037, Michael Griffin, the administrator of the U.S. space agency, indicated here Monday, saying the orbital International Space Station targeted for completion by 2010 would provide a "toehold in space" for travel first to the moon and then Mars.
Japan's 55-billion-yen ($478-million) Kaguya is the largest moon explorer since the U.S. Apollo missions ceased in the 1970s after six human landings, the only time mankind visited another world.
"The moon is no longer a place for us to visit," said JAXA's Tachikawa. "We should consider inhabiting and exploiting it."
The Kaguya orbiter, aiming to collect data for research on the moon's origin and evolution, will travel around the Earth before moving into an orbit of the moon in early October.
It will gather data on the distribution of chemical elements and minerals and study the moon's gravity and environment while searching for hydrogen.
Still, humanity is a "couple of generations away" from tapping commercial opportunities in outer space, including the moon, said Franco Bonacina, spokesman for the European Space Agency.
"But we need to go back to the moon to go even farther," he said. "The moon is a harbor — a kind of spare wheel — from where we can push to Mars."
In the scramble to reach the moon, spacefarers risk duplication of effort, said Indian scientist Rao, who called for cooperation between the world's space agencies to avoid that.
"Everyone doing the same work would be a waste of resources."
