Apollo 17: Humanity’s last mission to the Moon

Schmitt took command of the scenario, sizing up the photographs they would wish to acquire and digging a trench for samples. The crew had roughly half-hour earlier than mission guidelines dictated they return to the LM.

Cernan: Hey, he’s not — he’s not going out of his wits. It truly is.

Parker: [Half-joking.] Is it the identical shade as cheese? […]

Schmitt: It’s nearly the identical shade because the LMP decal on my digicam.

Parker: OK. Copy that.

Cernan: That’s orange, Jack! […]

Schmitt: Incredible, sports activities followers. It’s trench time! You possibly can see this in your shade tv, I’ll guess you.

Cernan: How can there be orange soil on the Moon?! [Pause.] Jack, that’s actually orange. It’s been oxidized! Inform Ron to get the lunar sounder [in the CM pointed] over right here.

Schmitt: It seems similar to a — an oxidized desert soil, that’s precisely proper.

Schmitt, Cernan, and the geologists instantly realized there was a chance that they’d stumbled upon a younger volcanic vent, the place escaping steam and gases had rusted the soil. Subsequent, Schmitt readied a core pattern.

Schmitt: Did you need that within the orange?

In Mission Management, voices shouted in unison from the geologists’ again room: “Sure!”

Parker: Roger, that’s affirm. We will put cores in grey soil on a regular basis.

After the mission, evaluation would present that the orange soil was not oxidized from volcanic venting; quite, it contained glassy beads that had fashioned from a fiery fountain of molten droplets and had been encased in a lava stream some 3.5 billion years in the past. Shorty Crater itself was fashioned by an impression — one which had excavated the beads from beneath.

Because the crew ready for his or her relaxation interval, CapCom Joe Allen shared some late-night philosophical musings.

Allen: Would possibly add, additionally, that there are a whole lot of us trying ahead to that third EVA tomorrow. It’s going to be the final one on the lunar floor for a while.

Cernan: I inform you, if it’s wherever close to what the primary two had been like, we’re trying ahead to it, additionally. [Long pause.]

Allen: Gene and Jack, we’re nonetheless marveling on the stunning tv photos that we’re getting out of your TV digicam there. It’s enjoyable, in reality, to observe the tracks that you simply’re abandoning within the lunar soil, each footprints and rover tracks. And a few of us are down right here now reflecting on what kind of mark or monitor will, sometime, disturb the tracks that you simply go away behind there tomorrow.

Cernan: That’s an fascinating thought, Joe, however I believe everyone knows that someplace, sometime, somebody will likely be right here to disturb these tracks.

Allen: Little question about it, Geno.

Schmitt: Don’t be too pessimistic, Joe. I believe it’s gonna occur.

* * *

The ultimate lunar EVA of the Apollo program took the pair throughout the opposite aspect of the valley to the North Massif. They drove by means of the sector of boulders strewn throughout the decrease slopes of the massif, made an tour east to pattern the Sculptured Hills, and completed the day surveying the rocky crater Van Serg.

When the crew returned to the LM, they carried out a short closing ceremony in entrance of the rover’s TV digicam. They unveiled a commemorative plaque on the base of Challenger and NASA administrator James Fletcher got here on the radio to convey well-wishes from President Richard Nixon.

Then, earlier than climbing up the ladder for the ultimate time, Cernan delivered one final soliloquy on essentially the most distant stage in human historical past.

Cernan: Bob, that is Gene, and I’m on the floor. And as I take man’s final steps from the floor again residence, for a while to come back — however, we imagine, not too lengthy into the long run — I’d like to simply [say] what I imagine historical past will document: that America’s problem of as we speak has solid man’s future of tomorrow. And as we go away the Moon and Taurus-Littrow, we go away as we got here, and, God keen, as we will return: with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.

In a 2007 NASA oral historical past, Cernan mirrored on these ultimate moments on the lunar floor.

Cernan: Individuals stored saying, “What are you going to say, what are going to be the final phrases on the Moon?” I by no means even thought of them till I used to be mainly crawling up the ladder. […]

I seemed down, and there was my ultimate footsteps on the floor […] I seemed over my shoulder as a result of the Earth was on high of the mountains within the southwestern sky. […]

I wasn’t coming again. This was it. I needed, like within the simulator, I needed to push the freeze button, cease time, cease the world. I simply needed to sit down there and take into consideration this second for a couple of moments, and hopefully take in extra subconsciously than I had the flexibility to soak up consciously.
However I couldn’t, there was no freeze button.

So up the ladder I went.