The Last Landing On The Moon
On the surface of the moon, Schmitt, a geologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, spent 22 hours over three days traveling in a rover driven by Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan, stopping to take photographs and, together with Cernan, filling sample bags with rocks and regolith. When Schmitt was done, he famously threw their geology hammer into the distance and climbed into the Lunar Module, followed by Cernan. After leaving NASA, Schmitt served a term as a Republican senator from New Mexico before his defeat in 1982.
The Last Landing On The Moon
Download File: https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Furlcod.com%2F2ue10B&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AOvVaw1_S_frhr_RYAEx9_0yBREO
When NASA's uncrewed Orion capsule returns from its journey around the moon this weekend, it will land on Earth exactly 50 years after Apollo 17, the last of the Apollo missions, touched down on the lunar surface.
It was the longest of all the moon landing missions and the only one to include a scientist. Schmitt was a geologist who had trained astronauts for previous lunar missions how to recognize different rock and mineral types.
When he went up on his first and only space mission, he and Cernan brought back a record 115 kilograms of lunar rocks for study back on Earth. One of those rocks eventually showed how the moon once had a magnetic field like the Earth.
During their roughly 75-hour stay on the lunar surface, the astronauts performed three spacewalks and deployed several scientific instruments to measure the properties of the moon's interior and its thin atmosphere.
As Cernan said in the 2007 documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, "I called the moon my home for three days of my life." The director of another documentary, Last Man on the Moon, also remembered him saying, "I had a house, I had a car, I had a job to do," about his time on the moon.
While the scientific return from Apollo 17 was high, by the time the flight came along, enthusiasm for the moon missions had waned, both for the public and among politicians who were footing the very expensive bills.
After all, the original goal of going to the moon, set by former U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1962 was not so much for science, but to prove America's technical superiority over the Soviet Union.
In the early 1960s the Soviet Union had achieved many firsts in space, including putting the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. Once the whole world had seen Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make the first footprints on the moon in July 1969, Kennedy's goal had been achieved. The space race was effectively over.
Now, more than half a century later, through the Artemis program, the plan is to go back to the moon and stay there long-term. The question is, will the political and public interest be sustained long enough to complete this program?
It is going to take a lot of flights and a lot of time to complete all of Artemis's planned objectives: return people to the moon, build an orbiting space station called Gateway, construct a lunar habitat on the surface, supply rovers and other equipment for exploration and provide support for those who'll live on the moon for up to two months at a time. The ultimate objective is to prepare for an eventual human mission to Mars.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong is famously quoted as saying after walking on the moon, but in interviews he claimed that he meant to say "one small step for a man."
A personal watch that Scott wore while walking on the moon sold for a whopping $1.625 million at auction in 2015. He is only one of three astronauts who have flown both earth orbital and lunar Apollo missions. He was born in 1932.
John Young was the only agency astronaut to go into space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs, and the first to fly into space six times. He was the ninth man to walk on the moon.
With the shocking launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957, the moon changed from a distant silver disk in the sky to a real place, a probable destination for probes and people. The Soviets struck first, flying Luna 1 by the moon in January 1959. They followed this success with a number of other robotic probes, culminating later the same year with Luna 3, which photographed the far side of the moon, never visible from Earth. From these early, poor quality images, we discovered that the far side has surprisingly little of the dark, smooth mare plains that cover about a third of the near side. Other surprises would soon follow.
In response to the 1961 flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The Apollo program greatly accelerated interest in exploring the moon. To ensure that human crews could safely land and depart from the lunar surface, it was important to understand its environment, surface and processes. At the same time, the robotic precursors would collect valuable information, constituting the first scientific exploration of another planetary body.
From these robotic missions, we learned that the moon was cratered and pitted at all scales. The surface was powdery dust but strong enough to support the weight of people and machines. The moon had no global magnetic field or atmosphere and was made up of common rock types, similar to those found on Earth. Now the stage was set for the next giant leap in understanding lunar and planetary history.
Apollo 16 was sent to the ancient crater Descartes, deep in the lunar highlands in April 1972. Astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke spent three days exploring the site. They traveled over 18 miles and collected more than 206 pounds of samples. They deployed and operated the first astronomical telescope on the moon. The highlands rocks, almost all breccias, attest to a long and complicated history of repeated impacts from space. Ancient crustal rocks, similar to the Genesis Rock of Apollo 15, were also found. One puzzling observation by the crew was the measurement of a very strong magnetic field on the surface. Even though the moon has no global magnetic field, some lunar samples have remnant magnetism, suggesting that they cooled in the presence of strong fields. Although we still do not understand lunar magnetism, with the flight of Lunar Prospector 26 years later, the Apollo 16 result would become a little clearer.
The last human mission to the moon to date, Apollo 17, was sent to the edge of Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity) -- another combination mare/highland site -- in December 1972. Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt (the first professional geologist sent to the moon) spent three days thoroughly exploring the Taurus-Littrow valley. They returned over 242 pounds of samples and deployed a set of new surface experiments. They made startling and significant discoveries. The crew found 3.6-billion-year old orange volcanic ash. From the mountains, they returned crustal rocks and complex breccias created during the impact that formed the Serenitatis basin almost 3.9 billion years ago. Lavas at this site are over 3.6 billion years old, documenting at least a 700-million-year span of lava flooding on the moon.
In 1982, we made a startling discovery. A meteorite found in Antarctica, ALHA 81005, is from the moon! The rock is a complex regolith breccia, similar to those returned by the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. We have since found over 50 meteorites that, as determined from their unique chemical composition, come from the moon. These rocks were blasted off the lunar surface by impacts, then captured and swept up by Earth as it moves through space. The lunar meteorites come from random places all over the moon and they provide data complementary to the Apollo samples and the global maps of composition obtained by Clementine and Lunar Prospector.
China's Chang'e 3 moon lander and its Yutu rover touched down on the moon Saturday (Dec. 14) at about 8:11 a.m. EST (1311 GMT), though it was late Saturday night local time at the mission's control center in Beijing during the landing. It is the first soft-landing on the moon by any spacecraft in 37 years.
Chang'e 3 launched toward the moon on Dec. 2 Beijing time to begin its two-week trek to the lunar surface. The spacecraft arrived in lunar orbit about five days after launch, and then began preparing for landing. A camera on the spacecraft snapped 59 photos of the moon during the descent, including a view straight from the lunar surface just after touchdown. [See photos from China's Chang'e 3 moon rover mission]
Following a lengthy engine burn Saturday, the mooncraft lowered itself to the lunar surface on autopilot, making what appeared to be a smooth touchdown on the Bay of Rainbows in the moon's northern hemisphere. The descent from lunar orbit to the moon's surface took about 12 minutes.
Chang'e 3's soft-landing was billed as the "black 12 minutes," deemed as the most difficult task during the mission, said Wu Weiren, the lunar program's chief designer. [Most Amazing Moon Missions of All Time]
Shortly after landing, Chang'e 3 deployed its vital solar arrays, which were folded for the landing, to begin generating power for its lunar surface mission. The lander is now expected to unleash the instrument-laden Yutu rover, built to trundle across the dusty, time-weathered terrain for months.
China Chang'e 3 lunar arrival is the first soft-landing on the moon since 1976. Not since the former Soviet Union's Luna 24 sample-return mission has a spacecraft made a controlled, soft touchdown on the lunar surface. The last soft-landing on the moon by NASA was in 1972 during the Apollo 17 manned lunar landing mission.
"This is a great day for lunar science and exploration, with the first successful soft landing on the surface of the Moon since the Soviet Union did it in 1976," said Clive Neal, a leading lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences.
"With a narrow lens, I hope the U.S. will be inspired to support a return to the moon through the power of commercial space entrepreneurship coupled with smart government partnerships and incentives," Richards told SPACE.com. 041b061a72