Word: apollo
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...short time later, Schmitt will probably be seen carrying off the familiar dumbbell-shaped package of scientific gear called ALSEP (for Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package). At a site some 300 ft. west of Challenger, Geologist Schmitt, with Cernan's help, will set up the five ALSEP experiments, giving space scientists their fifth automatic observatory on the moon (see Lunar Science, page 44). The ALSEP experiment that the scientists are particularly eager to monitor involves two probes that measure the flow of heat from the moon's interior. During Apollo 16, that $1,200,000 experiment was ruined...
...always been a source of great annoyance to scientists: though the Apollo program is one of the milestones in the history of scientific exploration, they have been precluded from participating directly in it. Now, confident of the Apollo landing techniques perfected by the military pilots on previous missions, NASA has chosen a handsome 37-year-old geologist named Harrison ("Jack") Schmitt to be copilot of Apollo 17. If all goes well, Schmitt next week will take a historic step: he will become the first scientist from earth to walk on another world...
Schmitt's preparation began long before Apollo was conceived. The son of a mining geologist, he grew up in Silver City, N. Mex., and decided early in life to become a geologist himself. As a youngster he visited mining camps, explored Indian reservations and made rock-hunting forays into the lunar-like deserts of the Southwest. At Caltech he studied under Ian Campbell and other noted earth scientists, including some of the men who will be watching his every move over TV from Mission Control's science support room...
Schmitt's companion on the surface of the moon will be the mission commander, Navy Captain Eugene Cernan, 38. A veteran astronaut, Cernan took a space walk during the 1966 earth-orbiting flight of Gemini 9 and flew the Apollo 10 lunar module to within nine miles of the moon's surface in 1969, during the final test of the Apollo system before an actual landing. Born on Chicago's North Side to first-generation Czechoslovak-American parents, he excelled in athletics in high school but turned down college football scholarships in order to study engineering...
Commander Ronald Evans, 39, Apollo 17's third crew member, is also a Navy flyer. In fact, he and Cernan were studying together at the Navy's Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., in 1963 when Cernan learned that he had been accepted by NASA and Evans was told that he had been turned down (he made it three years later). "That night," Evans recalls, "Gene and I went out and got totally sloshed." Born in the Kansas wheat-belt town of St. Francis, where his father worked for a wheat-silage company, Evans was an Eagle Scout...