![]() In all, 24 American astronauts made the trip from Earth to the Moon between 19. Four of America's moonwalkers are still alive: Aldrin (Apollo 11), David Scott (Apollo 15), Charles Duke (Apollo 16), and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17). Now, at Elbow Crater, viewers on Earth could watch Scott and Irwin in real time as they conducted science in the field, bagging samples and taking pictures.Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin were the first of 12 human beings to walk on the Moon. During Shepard’s and Mitchell’s slog at Fra Mauro, the camera back at Antares had stared out over motionless landscape the only change in the picture was a slow, subtle shift in the scene’s lighting as the sun crawled higher in the sky. Mission Control took remote control of the rover’s TV camera. ![]() They drove along the canyon’s lip until they were two straight-line miles from their own lunar module, Falcon, and stopped alongside Elbow Crater, timeworn and eleven hundred feet wide, the site of their first geologic investigation. ![]() And though piloting the rover involved some “sporty driving,” as Scott told Houston, they remained fresh. They’d already traveled twice the distance from Antares to the Cone Crater. Thirteen minutes into their ride, they reached the rille, nearly a mile wide and a thousand feet deep. Their transmissions were breathless, and at times their heartbeats. Dave Scott and Jim Irwin had a much more ambitious assignment than their predecessors: to cross a mile of hummocky, cratered plain to a spectacular gorge called the Hadley Rille, then follow its edge to the foot of a mountain that, in sheer mass, rivaled the biggest massifs on Earth-and climb its side. Skip ahead to the last day of July, and Apollo 15’s first traverse of the Hadley-Apennine region by lunar rover. He was confident they would “find what we’re looking for up there.” We can’t stop without looking into Cone Crater.” They’d traveled a long way to get here, and they were close, wherever they were. “Oh, let’s give it a whirl,” his partner countered. “I don’t think we’ll have time to go up there,” he told Mitchell. They came to another long slope, which Shepard figured would take thirty minutes to crest. But experiments on Earth had shown that an impact crater’s debris, or ejecta, is arranged around the hole in a predictable pattern, with the material from deepest underground closest in-and that if they wanted to sample lunar bedrock, which was a mission priority, they had to get near that rim. They could see Antares behind them getting back to safety was never in doubt. “It’s going to take longer than we expected,” Mitchell reported. This climb, too, ended in disappointment. Their transmissions were breathless, and at times their heartbeats, especially the forty-seven-year-old Shepard’s, spiked to the point that Houston urged them to rest. They marched on, pulling and carrying the MET, ascending another steep rise, growing more tired and frustrated by the minute, and steadily depleting the stores of air and cooling water in their backpacks. “We got fooled on that one.” But the moon played tricks on them. When they first stopped to gather samples, they were hundreds of yards short of where they thought they were. The same was true of craters: within minutes, the pair mistook small depressions for large, assigned them the wrong names, and in so doing, misjudged their location and thus their speed. ![]() And the astronauts’ perception of size and distance was jumbled by the absence of any visual yardsticks-trees or houses or clouds-so that a large rock hundreds of yards away looked no different from a smaller one close by. The gray surface concealed its features behind swells and declivities. Their maps depicted the landmarks they’d see on the way.īut the moon played tricks on them. Pulling a two-wheeled, rickshaw-like contraption for their tools and rock samples, they set out confident that they knew just where the crater was-“right over that way,” as Mitchell put it. and Edgar Mitchell embarked on the longest walk of the Apollo program-a hike over undulating ground to the rim of Cone Crater, a half mile away, where geologists hoped to find rocks from deep in the moon that had been blown from the hole during its creation. On their second excursion from their lunar module Antares, Apollo 14 astronauts Alan B. Consider the two lunar missions of 1971: Apollo 14, which landed in the moon’s rugged Fra Mauro region in early February, and Apollo 15, which six months later took its astronauts to a plain rimmed by sky-high mountains and a mammoth canyon, and carried the first LRV. ![]()
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