Quote:
JAXA says the SELENE project is the largest lunar mission since the U.S. Apollo program

Is that true?

It might be true but I have my doubts. Since Apollo, the moon hasn't received a lot of attention. The US launched the Clemintine and Lunar Prospector missions a while back and that's about it. The ESA had their SMART-1 lunar satellite. It seems to be a smaller mission than SELENE. However, the Soviet Union continued with unmanned lunar landers until 1976. That was a pretty big program that sounds a lot bigger than SELENE. After all, the Luna series landers included some that carried rovers and others that had sample return capability. It sounds like the article didn't account for the Soviet Luna program when making that statement.