Word: apollos
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From an equipment bay on the other side of the LM, the busy spacemen will remove EASEP (for Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Payload). They will set up one part of the package?a laser-beam reflector?some 70 ft. from the LM. The other experiment, a seismometer for measuring moonquakes and meteor impacts, will be placed 10 ft. farther away. Both will be left on the moon for the benefit of earthbound scientists (see following section...
...stage as a launch pad. If all goes well, they will rendezvous with Collins and transfer to the command module, taking their precious rocks with them in sealed boxes and leaving the LM in orbit around the moon. From that point on, they will again follow the path of Apollo 10. After firing themselves into an earth-bound trajectory, they will splash down in the Pacific Ocean some 1,160 miles southwest of Hawaii just before 1 p.m. (E.D.T.) on Thursday, July 24, their places in history assured...
...Apollo 11 manned landing will begin returning scientific dividends as soon as Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin start to explore the lunar surface. Both are competent amateur geologists. They have had more than 120 hours of instruction from NASA geologists, and they have practiced collecting rock and soil samples in lunarlike terrain such as the Grand Canyon, California's Medicine Lake highlands, the Arizona meteorite crater, the arctic wastelands of Iceland, and Alaska's Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Even their on-the-spot descriptions of the moon, to be transmitted instantaneously by radio to earth, should be of substantial value...
Beyond a doubt, however, the most important contribution of Apollo 11 to modern science will be the 100-odd lbs. of lunar rock and soil scheduled to be brought back by the astronauts. To safeguard this precious cargo, NASA has set up an elaborate system that stretches from the moon across space to Houston's $15.8 million Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) and to universities and laboratories all over the world. Says LRL Curator Elbert King: "Scientifically, this will be worth more than any other material in history...
...safety of their triple-sealed vacuum storage boxes, the lunar samples will be rushed to the LRL even before the Apollo 11 crew members arrive to wait out their 21-day quarantine period. There are "time-critical" tests that must be performed swiftly to detect any gas or radioactivity that the samples may give off; the emissions may decrease or stop soon after the sample is removed from the lunar surface. The samples will be sealed off from the rest of the world by a double biological barrier: 1) a vacuum system and a series of vacuum chambers in which...