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Apollo 17
Apollo 17 (December 7–19, 1972) was the final mission of NASA's Apollo program, the most recent time humans have set foot on the Moon or traveled beyond low Earth orbit. Commander Gene Cernan and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon, while Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans orbited above. Schmitt was the only professional geologist to land on the Moon; he was selected in place of Joe Engle, as NASA had been under pressure to send a scientist to the Moon. The mission's heavy emphasis on science meant the inclusion of a number of new experiments, including a biological experiment containing five mice that was carried in the command module. Mission planners had two primary goals in deciding on the landing site: to sample lunar highland material older than that at Mare Imbrium and to investigate the possibility of relatively recent volcanic activity. They therefore selected Taurus–Littrow, where formations that had been viewed and pictured from orbit ...
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Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, And Phooey
Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey were five mice who traveled to the Moon and circled it 75 times on the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. NASA gave them identification numbers A3305, A3326, A3352, A3356, and A3400, and their nicknames were given by the Apollo 17 crew, Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans. The four male mice, one female mouse, and Evans orbited the Moon for a record-setting six days and four hours in the Apollo command module ''America'' as Cernan and Schmitt performed the Apollo program's last lunar excursions. The mice travelled in individual compartments of tubes inside an aluminium container with "a sufficient food supply, temperature control, and a reserve of potassium superoxide that absorbed the from their respiration and provided them with fresh oxygen." One of the male mice died (A-3352) during the trip, and the four survivors were killed and dissected for their intended biological information upon their return from the Moon. The three astronauts and ...
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Gene Cernan
Eugene Andrew Cernan (; March 14, 1934 – January 16, 2017) was an American astronaut, naval aviator, electrical engineer, aeronautical engineer, and fighter pilot. During the Apollo 17 mission, Cernan became the eleventh human being to walk on the Moon. As he re-entered the Apollo Lunar Module after Harrison Schmitt on their third and final lunar excursion, he remains as of 2022, famously: "The last man on the Moon". Before becoming an astronaut, Cernan graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University and joined the U.S. Navy through the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC). After flight training, he received his naval aviator wings and served as a fighter pilot. In 1963, he received a Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Achieving the rank of captain, he retired from the Navy in 1976. Cernan traveled into space three times and to the Moon twice: as pilot of G ...
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Apollo 16
Apollo 16 (April 1627, 1972) was the tenth human spaceflight, crewed mission in the United States Apollo program, Apollo space program, administered by NASA, and the fifth and penultimate to Moon landing, land on the Moon. It was the second of Apollo's "List of Apollo missions#Alphabetical mission types, J missions", with an extended stay on the Geology of the Moon#Lunar landscape, lunar surface, a focus on science, and the use of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). The landing and Exploration of the Moon, exploration were in the Descartes Highlands, a site chosen because some scientists expected it to be an area formed by volcanic action, though this proved to not be the case. The mission was crewed by Apollo Commander, Commander John Young (astronaut), John Young, Lunar Module Pilot Charles Duke and Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly. Launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 16, 1972, Apollo 16 experienced a number of minor glitches en route to the Moon. These ...
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Lunar Orbit
In astronomy, lunar orbit (also known as a selenocentric orbit) is the orbit of an object around the Moon. As used in the space program, this refers not to the orbit of the Moon about the Earth, but to orbits by spacecraft around the Moon. The altitude at apoapsis (point farthest from the center of attraction) for a lunar orbit is known as apolune, apocynthion, or aposelene, while the periapsis (point closest to the center of attraction) is known as perilune, pericynthion, or periselene, from names or epithets of the moon goddess. Lunar orbit insertion (LOI) is the adjustment to achieve lunar orbit, as undertaken by Apollo spacecraft for example. Low lunar orbit (LLO) are orbits below altitude. They have a period of about 2 hours. They are of particular interest in exploration of the Moon, but suffer from gravitational perturbation effects that make most unstable, and leave only a few orbital inclinations possible for indefinite ''frozen orbits'', useful for long-term sta ...
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Shorty Crater
Shorty is a feature on Earth's Moon, an impact crater in the Taurus–Littrow valley. Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited it in 1972, on the Apollo 17 mission. It is the location of the famous "orange soil", which geologists believe to be small bits of rapidly-cooled molten rock ejected in a fire fountain. It is about in diameter and up to deep. To the east of Shorty are Victory, Camelot, and the Apollo 17 landing site. To the southeast is Brontë. To the southwest are Lara and Nansen. The crater was named after the character "Shorty" in Richard Brautigan's 1967 novel ''Trout Fishing in America'', as well as to honor the genre of the short story with particular reference to J. D. Salinger.The Valley of Taurus-Littrow
Apollo 17 Lunar Surface Journal, Corrected Transcript and Commentary Copyright 1995 by Eric M ...
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Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package
The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) comprised a set of scientific instruments placed by the astronauts at the landing site of each of the five Apollo missions to land on the Moon following Apollo 11 (Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17). Apollo 11 left a smaller package called the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package, or EASEP. Background The instrumentation and experiments that would comprise ALSEP were decided in February 1966. Specifically, the experiments, institutions responsible, and principal investigators and coinvestigators were: * Passive Lunar Seismic Experiment: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Frank Press; Columbia University, George Sutton; Georgia Tech, Robert Hostetler * Lunar Tri-axis Magnetometer: Ames Research Center, C. P. Sonett; Marshall Space Flight Center, Jerry Modisette. * Medium-Energy Solar Wind: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, C. W. Snyder and M. M. Neugebauer. * Suprathermal Ion Detection: Rice University, J. W. Freeman, ...
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Moon Rock
Moon rock or lunar rock is rock originating from Earth's Moon. This includes lunar material collected during the course of human exploration of the Moon, and rock that has been ejected naturally from the Moon's surface and landed on Earth as meteorites. Sources Moon rocks on Earth come from four sources: those collected by six United States Apollo program crewed lunar landings from 1969 to 1972; those collected by three Soviet uncrewed Luna probes in the 1970s; those collected by the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program's uncrewed probes; and rocks that were ejected naturally from the lunar surface before falling to Earth as lunar meteorites. Apollo program Six Apollo missions collected 2,200 samples of material weighing , processed into more than 110,000 individually cataloged samples. Luna program Three Luna spacecraft returned with of samples. The Soviet Union abandoned its attempts at a crewed lunar program in the 1970s, but succeeded in landing three robotic Lun ...
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Extravehicular Activity
Extravehicular activity (EVA) is any activity done by an astronaut in outer space outside a spacecraft. In the absence of a breathable Earthlike atmosphere, the astronaut is completely reliant on a space suit for environmental support. EVA includes ''spacewalks'' and lunar or planetary surface exploration (commonly known from 1969 to 1972 as ''moonwalks''). In a stand-up EVA (SEVA), an astronaut stands through an open hatch but does not fully leave the spacecraft. EVA has been conducted by the Soviet Union/Russia, the United States, Canada, the European Space Agency and China. On March 18, 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first human to perform a spacewalk, exiting the Voskhod 2 capsule for 12 minutes and 9 seconds. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to perform a moonwalk, outside his lunar lander on Apollo 11 for 2 hours and 31 minutes. On the last three Moon missions, astronauts also performed deep-space EVAs on the return to Earth, to retrieve film canist ...
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Volcano
A volcano is a rupture in the Crust (geology), crust of a Planet#Planetary-mass objects, planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and volcanic gas, gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where list of tectonic plates, tectonic plates are divergent boundary, diverging or convergent boundary, converging, and most are found underwater. For example, a mid-ocean ridge, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates whereas the Pacific Ring of Fire has volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates. Volcanoes can also form where there is stretching and thinning of the crust's plates, such as in the East African Rift and the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic field and Rio Grande rift in North America. Volcanism away from plate boundaries has been postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs from the core–mantle boundary, deep in the Earth. This results in hotspot ...
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Mare Imbrium
Mare Imbrium (Latin ''imbrium'', the "Sea of Showers" or "Sea of Rains", "Sea of Tears") is a vast lava plain within the Imbrium Basin on the Moon and is one of the larger craters in the Solar System. The Imbrium Basin formed from the collision of a proto-planet during the Late Heavy Bombardment. Basaltic lava later flooded the giant crater to form the flat volcanic plain seen today. The basin's age has been estimated using uranium–lead dating methods to approximately 3.9 billion years ago, and the diameter of the impactor has been estimated to be 250 ± 25 km. The Moon's maria (plural of mare) have fewer features than other areas of the Moon because molten lava pooled in the craters and formed a relatively smooth surface. Mare Imbrium is not as flat as it was originally thought, because later events have altered its surface. Origin Mare Imbrium formed when a proto-planet from the asteroid belt collided with the moon during the Late Heavy Bombardment. The impact ...
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Lunar Highlands
The geology of the Moon (sometimes called selenology, although the latter term can refer more generally to " lunar science") is quite different from that of Earth. The Moon lacks a true atmosphere, which eliminates erosion due to weather. It does not have any known form of plate tectonics, it has a lower gravity, and because of its small size, it cooled faster. The complex geomorphology of the lunar surface has been formed by a combination of processes, especially impact cratering and volcanism. The Moon is a differentiated body, with a crust, mantle, and core. Geological studies of the Moon are based on a combination of Earth-based telescope observations, measurements from orbiting spacecraft, lunar samples, and geophysical data. Six locations were sampled directly during the crewed Apollo program landings from 1969 to 1972, which returned of lunar rock and lunar soil to Earth In addition, three robotic Soviet Luna spacecraft returned another of samples, and the ...
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Joe Engle
Joe Henry Engle (born August 26, 1932) is an American pilot, aeronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut. He was the commander of two Space Shuttle missions including STS-2 in 1981, the program's second orbital flight. He also flew three flights in the Shuttle program's 1977 Approach and Landing Tests. Engle is one of twelve pilots who flew the North American X-15, an experimental spaceplane jointly operated by the Air Force and NASA. As an X-15 pilot, Engle made three flights above 50 miles, thus qualifying for astronaut wings under the American convention for the boundary of space. In 1966 he was selected for NASA's fifth Astronaut Group, joining the Apollo program. He was the backup Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) for Apollo 14 and originally scheduled as LMP for Apollo 17. However, cancellation of later flights prompted NASA to select geologist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt as LMP, displacing Engle. Engle is an experienced spaceplane operator and the last living X-15 pilot. ...
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