Apollo 17 launched on December 7th, 1972. It was the last of the six missions to successfully land on the Moon and the first to have a scientists, Harrison Schmidt (geologist), walk on the Moon. They spent more time on the lunar surface (over three days) and walking on the Moon (over 22 hours spread over three Moon walks) than any other mission.Watching this launch is one of my earliest childhood memories. I have vague memories of other Moon missions, but this one is the most clear. It's easy to pin down since it was the only night launch. I was only four years old. I remember watching it and there was a launch delay that I remember taking a long time and that I got to stay up way past my usual bedtime to watch the launch. Boy, was I right! Now I can look stuff up and see that it was a 2 hour and 40 minute delay and Apollo 17 finally launched at 12:33am EST. I was in the central time zone so I saw the launch at 11:33pm, pretty late for a four year old to stay up glued to the television!
Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt landed on the Moon while Ronald Evans stayed in orbit with the command module. Next year will mark forty years since we last set foot on the Moon. We are long overdue to get back.Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicst Blog.
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5 comments:
I agree. I'd love to see more moon landings and space exploration. Maybe if we didn't spend so much money on war, we could afford a little extra space.
Orbs I do agree with you. That is what they should start doing.
I think it's neat they can land on the moon but I would like to see them spend more money on the oceans floors looking for cures for diseases and alternative fuels or something...And send me a bunch of lobster.....
You're right, SER. I believe that most of the oceans' floors are still unexplored.
That ocean floor question is always an interesting one (for the record, I am in favor or more exploration there too!)
We have maps of the entire ocean floor. We know where the big undersea mountain ranges and deep canyons are. The question is, what's the resolution of those maps? What's the smallest detail we can see? There we don't do so well over much of the world's oceans. Most of the maps of ocean floors are from sonar, not from submersible exploration.
I always hear people talk say things like we have better maps of the Moon (or Mars) than our own oceans. I have been getting more interested in the comparisons the more I hear those statements and would really like to find some time to investigate them further.
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