Adventure at Descartes

"Well, Orion is finally here, Houston. Fahn-taah-stick!"

As Charles Duke's jubilant Southern drawl crackled across 240,000 miles of space last week, all the world breathed a sigh of relief. After a nerve-racking delay of nearly six hours, during which NASA officials came close to calling off Apollo 16's lunar landing, Astronauts Duke and John Young had brought the landing craft Orion to a nearly perfect touchdown only 200 yards off target in the moon's mountain-ringed Descartes region. It was man's fifth successful landing on the lunar surface, and the first in the highlands, the moon's oldest and most rugged terrain.

While Astronaut Ken Mattingly orbited overhead in the command module Casper, Duke and Young stared out their cabin window onto the sundrenched Cayley Plains. Near their spacecraft, they excitedly reported to scientists back in Mission Control, was a large variety of rocks and boulders, some as big as 10 ft. across, glistening in shades of white and pink and gray. "All we have to do is jump out the hatch and we've got plenty of rocks," exclaimed Duke. The astronauts also reported brilliantly gleaming ray patterns --splashes of material gouged from the moon's interior by meteorite impacts --and telltale layering on the face of a hillside to the south. "Man, it really looks nice out there," said Duke. "I'm like a little kid on Christmas Eve."

For a while, it had seemed that Christmas would never come. For Apollo 16 had suffered more than its share of worrisome glitches on its way to the moon. First, there were minor troubles --the mysterious flickering of a computer warning light, the mid-flight peeling of protective paint off the lunar module and the recalcitrant zipper on Young's space suit. Then, after the Apollo had gone into orbit around the moon and Orion, with Duke and Young aboard, had separated from Casper, came real cause for alarm.

As the two spacecraft emerged from behind the moon at the beginning of their 13th lunar revolution, Mattingly reported some chilling news: the backup circuit on a steering motor controlling Casper's bell-shaped engine nozzle during firings was swiveling the nozzle erratically back and forth--and Mattingly could do nothing about it. The astronauts were in no immediate danger, but under mission rules the command module's primary and secondary guidance systems must both be operational before a lunar landing can be attempted. The reason: if the command ship's engine cannot be controlled, the rocket power of the lunar lander is necessary to get the reunited ships back to earth. In fact, that so-called "life raft mode" was used to bring home the stricken Apollo 13 spacecraft two years ago.

Mobilization. In a desperate effort to salvage the landing, engineers and scientists were mobilized at three key sites--at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, where Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan clambered aboard a command ship simulator; at MIT's Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, where the guidance system was developed; and at the Downey, Calif., plant of North American Rockwell, where the command ship was built. The objective: to duplicate the oscillation, determine how serious it was, and devise a possible solution. And there was little time for the tricky task. After only five more revolutions (ten hours), the orbital paths of the two spacecraft would pass too far to the side of the landing site (which was gradually moving away because of the moon's slow rotation under the orbiting craft), and the landing attempt would have to be abandoned. Fortunately, the task force found the answer after only four hours: the oscillations, which swing through only 1 DEG of arc, would not significantly alter the direction of the spacecraft even if the balky secondary guidance system had to be used. Exultant controllers passed the word to Orion: "You're go for landing."

After Orion safely settled at the bottom of a shallow crater, Young and Duke checked the spacecraft for damage and then, exhausted from their tense ordeal, they slept for about seven hours. This time there was no television picture of the astronauts' first steps on the lunar surface; the spacecraft's steerable antenna had jammed and could not be pointed at the earth. But the radio signals were sufficiently strong to carry Young's initial words back to earth. "Here you are, mysterious and unknown Descartes, highland plains," he said. "Apollo 16 is going to change your image." With that ambitious goal in mind, the astronauts spent the next seven hours loping around the site in the weak lunar gravity. They set up experiments, examined the hill-and-dale terrain, and dodged in and out of craters like youngsters on a spree. "Yahoo," shouted Duke. "This is so great you can't believe it."

Even another crop of exasperating problems failed to dampen the astronauts' enthusiasm. For all his tugging, Young was unable to open the LM's external equipment bay until Houston radioed some helpful advice. Then one of the rover's two vital batteries seemed half dead until it suddenly came back to life. To the horror of watching scientists, Duke lost his grip on the bulky nuclear power plant for the lunar experiments and let it drop. "It's O.K.," he said sheepishly, as he retrieved the package. "All the experiments seem to be intact."

Young was not so lucky. As he moved awkwardly through the moon dust, his right foot ripped loose a cable leading to the heat-flow experiment and left the $ 1,200,000 device useless. "God almighty. Oh, I'm sorry," Young repeatedly apologized, realizing that he and Duke could not repair the damage. Disappointed scientists would now have to wait until the next mission to confirm the puzzling heat-flow findings of Apollo 15. Those readings suggest that the moon's interior, once thought to be relatively cold, is actually giving off heat at twice the expected rate.

Before the first moon walk ended, scientists in Houston were surprised to hear that the multitude of rocks gathered by the astronauts apparently included few crystalline, or heat-formed specimens; that cast doubt on the theory that the Descartes area's Cayley Plains were once the site of volcanic flows. The day's prize find was made by the Houston scientists themselves. With the TV finally on after a second antenna had been aligned with earth, they could direct Duke's attention to a large, football-sized rock that glittered with imbedded black glass fragments. "It's a 'great Scott'-sized rock," said the delighted Duke, recalling the record 22-Ib. specimen picked up by Apollo 15 Astronaut David Scott last year.

Spiked Juice. Back in the lunar module for another rest period, the astronauts exchanged notes, unaware that their voices were being picked up by a live mike. "I got the farts again, Charlie," Young was heard to say. "I think it's acid in the stomach." He blamed it on the large doses of potassium-spiked orange juice prescribed by doctors to counteract the effects of weightlessness (see MEDICINE). The strange potion did not seem to bother him on the second moon walk, when the astronauts took more core samples, picked up rocks, and pushed over a large boulder to collect soil from underneath it (so scientists can compare the effects of cosmic-ray bombardment on varying soil samples). They drove the rover several hundred feet up Stone Mountain and, after parking it on what they thought was a dangerously steep slope, they simply picked it up and put it down in a more secure spot.

Many of the scientific benefits from Apollo 16 are still in the offing. With a new, semiautomatic $2,000,000 electronic camera, developed by the Naval

Research Laboratory, the astronauts took ultraviolet pictures of the clouds of ionized (charged) hydrogen gases that occupy the vast regions between the stars. These observations, which may offer new clues to such questions as how stars are formed, cannot be made from earth where the atmosphere blocks ultraviolet light. In addition, at a number of their stops, the astronauts took careful measurements to augment data about the moon's magnetic field, which analysis of moon rocks shows was once surprisingly strong; the strong field, in turn, suggests that the core of the moon was once molten. Aboard Casper, high above the moon's surface, Command Ship Pilot Mattingly made his own scientific contributions. Among other valuable exercises, he shot stereo pictures of the moon's surface, including the far side which is hidden from earth, and measured the solar wind, the constant streams of particles that flow away from the sun. His most important observation may well have been a visual one: he described large globs of material near the Crater Mandelshtam that provided scientists with the first evidence of ancient lava flows on the moon's far side.

Although NASA officials had earlier talked of scrubbing the scheduled third EVA (extravehicular activity) because of the extra oxygen and fuel consumed in the delayed landing, they decided that another excursion was possible, and the astronauts prepared to take a final spin on the lunar surface. It would take them north toward Smoky Mountain. Then, after stowing their rocks, film and other paraphernalia in the lunar module and positioning the rover's camera to televise the liftoff, Duke and Young were to fire Orion's upper stage engine and head for a reunion with Mattingly, orbiting overhead in Casper. Later, Casper's own powerful engine would be fired to hurl the command ship out of lunar orbit and start the three astronauts on their three-day journey home.

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