Exploration of the Moon with the Hiten spacecraft, becoming the third country to place an object in orbit around the Moon. The spacecraft released the Hagoromo probe into lunar orbit, but the transmitter failed, thereby preventing further scientific use of the spacecraft. In September 2007, Japan launched the SELENE spacecraft, with the objectives "to obtain scientific data of the lunar origin and evolution and to develop the technology for the future lunar exploration", according to the JAXA official website. The European Space Agency launched a small, low-cost lunar orbital probe called SMART 1 on September 27, 2003. SMART 1's primary goal was to take
Lunar orbit an apolune of and a perilune of . Then the orbit was circularized at around to obtain suitable imagery. Five such spacecraft were launched over a period of thirteen months, all of which successfully mapped the Moon, primarily for the purpose of finding suitable Apollo program landing sites. The most recent was the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which became a ballistic impact experiment in 2014. The Apollo program's Command/Service Module (CSM) remained in a lunar parking orbit while the Lunar Module (LM) landed. The combined CSM/LM would first enter an elliptical orbit, nominally by , which was