Word: lunar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Slayton passed his examinations with flying colors, and last spring NASA again cleared him. Still, his chances of getting an assignment seemed as remote as the moon. All places on the remaining lunar expeditions were already filled; crews had also been picked for the three earth-orbiting Skylab missions. Only one faint chance remained, and Slayton was not about to miss it for lack of qualifications. Even before Washington and Moscow firmly agreed last year to undertake the historic joint mission, Deke began to study Russian...
Though the U.S. has called off its program of lunar exploration, Russian interest in the moon shows no sign of waning. Last week, only a month after the final visit of American astronauts to the moon, the Soviets successfully landed their second unmanned lunar rover in two years. Looking like an old-fashioned washtub sitting atop eight small wheels, Lunokhod (moonwalker) 2 rolled down the gangplank of its lander and parked itself in a mountainous region at the edge of the Sea of Serenity, only about 100 miles from Apollo 17's Taurus-Littrow base...
...damage rather than the causes seems to horrify Soviet reporters. Strip-mining, which accounts for about 75% of the U.S.S.R.'s manganese output and 30% of its coal, has become a favorite target. In the Ukraine, the Literary Gazette reports, one mine has turned its surroundings into "a lunar landscape." Another mine was described as so destructive that "to restore fertility would need 50,000 years." The article quotes a surface-mine manager as saying "We are waging an insane war with the earth...
Gamble. The excellence of the Apollo 17 photographs is also due in part to the quality of the film used by the astronauts. On previous missions, NASA'S photographic advisers opted for a fairly sensitive film similar to Ekta-chrome-EF; because lunar lighting conditions were uncertain, they wanted a fast emulsion. But for Apollo 17, the space agency decided to switch to another Kodak film that is somewhat slower (ASA rating of only 64 v. 160 for the earlier film), but has significantly less grain and better color reproduction. The gamble worked. The record 3,800 frames that...
...photographic outpouring also pleased scientists at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, who found the pictures highly useful in initial identification and examination of the freshly arrived lunar rocks last week. Geochemist Paul Cast, the Manned Spacecraft Center's chief lunar scientist, noted, for example, that the closeups of the moon's surface were so clear that the orange soil showed up as a distinct band in the surrounding material. To Cast, those sharp color boundaries were another indication that the orange soil is young by lunar standards and a product of relatively recent volcanism on the moon...