It was on this day in 1972 that the Apollo 17 spacecraft made a safe landing back on Earth. The Apollo 17 mission was the sixth and last lunar mission in which people got out and walked around on the moon. The first lunar landing was in July of 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon’s surface during the Apollo 11 mission. In less than three years, six more manned Apollo missions headed for the moon, and all of them except for Apollo 13 successfully carried astronauts all the way to the surface (an oxygen tank blew up on Apollo 13, but everyone survived). Altogether, 12 people have walked on the moon’s surface, 2 of them members of the Apollo 17 crew. Apollo 17 had a crew of three: Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans. The astronauts were planning to conduct geology research; and to prepare for the diversity of the lunar surfaces, they had extensive training at Big Bend National Park in Texas, the Sudbury Basin impact crater in Ontario, the volcanoes of Hawaii’s Big Island, and other sites in Montana, California, and Nevada. Although all the NASA astronauts were trained in basic geology research, Schmitt was already a geologist, and became known as the only scientist to walk on the moon. Apollo 17 launched just after midnight on December 7. On December 10, the crew arrived in the lunar orbit. Evans remained in orbit for several days conducting research, while Cernan and Schmitt got into a smaller lunar module and landed on the moon’s surface. They took lots of rock and soil samples, including rocks that were older and younger than those collected in other Apollo missions. Schmitt found what looked like orange soil, and turned out to be particles of volcanic glass. Just before getting back into the lunar module, Cernan scratched his daughter’s initials into the lunar dust.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 17:36:39 +0000
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