Word: lunar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...doubt about it. For all the problems they had encountered on the way to the moon and in the process of setting up their experiments, the Apollo 16 astronauts scored a scientific triumph. Young and Duke spent 20 hours and 14 minutes prowling the lunar surface, only three-quarters of an hour short of their original goal. They also collected so much moon material that they nearly ran out of collection bags. Most significant of all, the next to last Apollo mission has already given scientists valuable new details about the terrain that makes up more than...
...surface, possibly the residue of an ancient magnetic field. The readings thus provide new support for the disputed theory that the moon once rotated rapidly and had a molten iron core. Acting like a dynamo as the moon spun through space, this core could have created a strong lunar magnetic field...
Much of the lunar material was gathered at the beginning of the week during the third and final EVA (extravehicular activity) by Young and Duke on the plains of Descartes. With helpful navigational guidance from Houston, 240,000 miles away, the astronauts drove their $12 million moon cart to the very rim of a large feature called North Ray Crater, some three miles away from the lunar lander, Orion. As the rover's television camera followed them, they threaded their way down North Ray's steep slopes, going deeper into a large crater than any of the eight...
...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...
Berry hopes his precautions will make medication unnecessary. "Prescribing a cardiac drug on the lunar surface from 250,000 miles away would be a first that I would prefer to avoid," he says. But Berry hopes to score a first by learning-with greater precision than last time-how much potassium is lost by astronauts traveling and working in space. To do this, he determined the preflight potassium levels of each of the Apollo 16 astronauts. He has also asked them to bring back urine samples from a test to be conducted during the flight, and is confident that...