Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Orange Soil. Scientists shared the enthusiasm of NASA'S engineers. In Houston, they eagerly anticipated examining Apollo 17's 250 lbs. of moon rocks, 3,000 photographs and reams of scientific data. Every sign pointed to the likelihood that the Taurus-Littrow landing site had fulfilled the greatest hopes of the scientists who selected it, that the findings in the area would help fill important gaps in the lunar chronology. Apollo's cargo of rocks includes fragmented specimens called breccias that may have been formed far back in the moon's history, perhaps as long...
...experiments also posed problems. Cernan worked so hard trying to drill holes for the important heat-flow experiment-which had been inadvertently disconnected on the Apollo 16 mission-that his pulse climbed to 150 beats per minute. NASA doctors, monitoring his heartbeat, ordered him to rest. Coming to Cernan's aid, Schmitt took a dramatic spill as he tried to extract a balky core tube from the ground. All of the experiments were finally set up, but it was learned later that a key instrument-the surface gravimeter-had jammed. It was a bitter disappointment to scientists...
...astronauts' enthusiasm on the moon was shared by scientists watching in Mission Control's "back room." Caltech's Gerald Wasserburg jumped up from his fourth-row seat and practically pressed his nose against the TV screen to see the coloring for himself. NASA'S Egyptian-born geologist Farouk El Baz, who had helped train the astronauts, beamed proudly. Even the space agency's cautious Australian-born Geochemist Robin Brett exulted: "We have witnessed one of the important finds in Apollo geology...
...NASA technicians frantically traced the source of the trouble, rumors swept the cape that there had been an explosion in the first stage of the rocket. Actually, NASA explained later, the early burst of flame had been a burn-off of excess fuel: the pumps had continued to run briefly after the shutdown. The real problem, it turned out, was a defect in the Terminal Countdown Sequencer, which supervises the complex operations in the last minutes before a launch...
Though the scenario has the ring of fiction, it could become fact-in the unlikely event that the U.S. Congress has a change of heart and next year appropriates funds* for a manned trip to Mars. If that approval were given, NASA's dreamer planners would not be unprepared. They have already spelled out in detail a daring program that could land Americans on the Red Planet by the mid-1980s...