Word: duking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Houston last week, Apollo 16 Astronauts John Young, Charles Duke and Tom Mattingly took time out from their debriefings to hold a news conference at which they showed off their lunar camera work. "No picture can do justice to the beauty of the scene," said Mattingly as he pointed to one moonscape, "and this is no exception." Nonetheless the films shot by the Apollo 16 astronauts are among the best ever taken in space; they provide an extraordinarily realistic sense of what it is like to land, walk and ride on the moon...
...swirl of gray dust as the lander touches on the surface. There are also still shots that strikingly convey the eerie desolation of lunar distances. None is more dramatic than one that shows the Lunar Rover parked on the far edge of a yawning crater while Astronaut Duke picks up soil samples in the foreground (see color pages). One alarming view of Orion, shot from Casper by Mattingly, shows mysteriously damaged panels on the side of the lunar module as it returns from the surface of the moon...
...show the Rover bouncing off rocks as Astronaut John Young hot-rods along the Cayley Plains or throwing up rooster tails of moon dust as he puts it through a series of skidding, Le Mans-type racing turns. "It's simply a superb vehicle," said the high-spirited Duke after his return to Houston. The vehicle's designers could only agree. NASA engineers announced that they were delighted with the moon buggy and said that they planned no changes in it for December's Apollo 17 mission...
...moon walkers also gathered a valuable "shadowed" sample of lunar soil from what Duke called a "gopher hole" under a large rock. Shielded from the sun's relentless rays, the sample may still contain volatile chemicals that would otherwise have long ago been "boiled off" by the intense solar heat. Finally, as the long EVA drew to a close, the astronauts headed back toward Orion, setting a lunar record of 1 1 m.p.h. in their electric-powered cart and drawing a mild rebuke from Houston for speeding...
...protective gold foil. The camera worked so well that Houston could follow Orion's ascent for nearly two minutes, until the little craft was no more than a speck of light against the utter blackness of space. Later, after Orion locked with Casper in moon orbit, Young and Duke rejoined Mattingly, who could not resist twitting them about all the dust and debris they were bringing with them. Later, having nearly obscured their original check lists with fresh flight data radioed by Houston, Duke and Young apparently overlooked one item and forgot to close a circuit breaker in Orion...