Word: lunar
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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...
Movie footage taken through a window of the descending lunar module Orion offers a panoramic view of the rubbled Cayley Plains, the craters looming ever larger. Then a black speck appears on the approaching surface, expanding rapidly until it is recognizable as Orion's sharp, spidery shadow, and finally disappearing in a 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...
Some of the most exciting film involves the electric-powered Lunar Rover. One sequence, shot from the Rover, provides a driver's-eye view of the passing landscape as the little vehicle skitters across the rock-littered surface. Others 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...
...Lunar Transformations. Graphic interpretations of the surface of the moon, by Len Gittleman. Part of "Transformations" a major exhibition of faculty work. Carpenter Center, through...
...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. Result: when the Lunar Module was finally cast loose from the mother ship, its computer could not fire its small thruster rockets. Thus, Orion could not be sent crashing back onto the moon's surface, where telling shock waves from its impact were to have been recorded by sensitive seismometers. Instead, the now-useless...