Section 10: Lunar Surface

Young: The post-landing power-down was nominal.

Duke: We had a few changes because of landing 6 hours late. They had us power down the AC bus and also the LGC DSKY breaker to save power, and all that worked just great. I thought those procedures came up in good shape. We just floated right to the checklist for those changes and then we were right on.

Young: The trouble with pulling the mission timer is you lose a clock, and that makes the emergency lift-off times absolutely meaningless. You donÂ’t have any idea what time it is. We kept getting a block and lift-off time and I didnÂ’t know what to do with them. I didnÂ’t know what time it was.

Duke: We had no idea what GE was, but we had a Houston watch. They ought to read them to you in Houston time, then you can use your wristwatch.

Young: What you would do in the real world if you had to do an emergency lift-off at one of those times, you had contact with the ground, you would roughly use that time to get you powered up on time and have the ground count you down to the second for the lift-off.

Duke: But these are no-comm times.

Young: ThatÂ’s correct.

Duke: Then, they were worthless.

Young: It seems to me if you lose your timer, you arenÂ’t going to hit it on the second - you may hit it on the minute.

Duke: YouÂ’re right. I highly recommend the procedure that we used for parking that platform in gimbal lock. And we parked that beauty for 71 hours, and we didnÂ’t even have a PIPA bias or gyro drift update. And, it just worked like a champ.

Young: Venting was nominal. Landing site orientation was about as flat as you can get. Like I said, "ItÂ’s more luck than skill," (laughter). I hate to admit it, but itÂ’s true. Twenty-five meters either way and we would have been on a 10-degree slope.

Duke: ItÂ’s like landing on a carrier.

Young: Add 15 meters to that, and we would have been in a hole.

Duke: I had a good feeling that we knew just about where we were when we touched down. That big ridge was on our maps and had Smoky Mountains right out my window. John had called Double Spot going by, and I could look south and see all the landmarks down there. We had a good idea we were within a couple hundred meters, anyway.

Young: We could have almost triangulated off Stone Mountain with some kind of compass. You could have said, out there at 10:30 I see a ridge line and a crater. You could have done that and from one window you could have triangulated yourself in. There wasnÂ’t any reason to do that.

Here is a problem that was annoying to both of us. The night before, we filled the drink bags full of orange juice in the CSM; and the next morning prior to suit donning, we put them in the suit. Every time we bent our head, the microphone would get caught in the drink bag and put some orange juice into the air in zero gravity or would squirt the side of your face. Charlie really got covered up with it. It really was an annoying problem.

Duke: My valve was really bad.

Young: Mine didnÂ’t work all the time, and I was really being careful. IÂ’m sure it got all over us because once we got on the surface and looked up at the Lunar Module, the travano cover had orange juice all over it. It was in dots, less than 5 percent, but there was a lot of orange juice on the travano cover. IÂ’m sure orange juice is something you donÂ’t want to float around on wire bundles. I think we need something to stop up that hole in zero gravity and in one-sixth gravity until you are ready to use it. Maybe a cap that fits on the end of it that you could pull with your teeth would work. I think itÂ’s essential when youÂ’re going out for a 7- or 8-hour EVA, you have to have something in that suit to drink.

Duke: Yes, that really saved me out there.

Young: I took my suit off and didnÂ’t put the drink bag in right for the first EVA. I didnÂ’t get anything to drink while I was out on the Moon and that was bad. I sure could have used a drink about half-way through. You do sweat a lot while you are out there. You sweat in your hands, you sweat at the back of your neck, and you sweat on your feet where you donÂ’t have water cooling. We should have one that doesnÂ’t spend its time wetting you down. And there was another problem associated with this. Before we went out the next day, Charlie had to clean the orange juice out of his microphone to get it to work. We wasnÂ’t transmitting at all.

Duke: On Vox.

Young: He had a comm carrier with one mike gone because of a busted wire and had to suck the orange juice out of the other mike to get it to work. Now thatÂ’s a pretty marginal operation (laughter).

Duke: Every time the left microphone hit that valve, the juice sort of migrated up that microphone in under my helmet, and this whole side of my head was just caked with juice.

Young: Charlie looked like he had been shampooing with juice.

Duke: It was really terrible.

Young: The whole side of his face was just one big mass of orange juice. We got it on the helmet seal between the second and third EVA. We cleaned the orange juice off the helmet seal because we couldnÂ’t get the helmets unlocked and off. I thought we were going to spend the night in the pressure suit.

Duke: It really wasnÂ’t on the O-ring; it was where the two surfaces mate together.

Young: Yes.

Duke: The stuff had seeped in under there.

Young: The vacuum dried out that thing, and left the glue there. When it was time to take the helmets off, I couldnÂ’t get CharlieÂ’s off and he couldnÂ’t get mine off. I tell you, I thought we were going to stay in the pressure suit. (Laughter) I couldnÂ’t pull the button out, and I couldnÂ’t get it to slide.

Duke: The button would come out, but I couldnÂ’t make it slide up or down.

Mattingly: If thatÂ’s the case with both of you, then is that really a case against the orange juice, or is that something else?

Duke: ItÂ’s the orange juice.

Young: Mine was leaking, too. At least, it wasnÂ’t leaking as bad as CharlieÂ’s.

Duke: It was enough to solidify when he stepped out on the surface.

Young: Where you get the problem with the orange juice is during the prep. ItÂ’s not bad once you get on the Moon. ItÂ’s not bad because youÂ’re not bending into it all the time. While youÂ’re doing a prep, thereÂ’s a lot of looking down you have to do, and every time you bend your head forward and wrap your microphone around that thing and pull back, that works the plug and it squirts in your ear. ItÂ’s already under pressure, because you have 32 ounces in there, and youÂ’re bending forward so your chest is pushing on it. ItÂ’s just like a pump that pumps orange juice right in your mouth, your face, or ear.

Duke: Maybe you could design a valve like the one for Skylab.

Young: Design one that works. Well, IÂ’ll tell you, I really believe that by having a lot of something to drink in a pressure suit is a way to go. I think it sure helped me and Charlie out on the surface, but it certainly got to be a problem with orange juice floating around the cockpit as an electrical conductor. With it floating all over you and getting in your comm carrier, itÂ’s a problem; and then floating down in the neck-ring or - worse yet would be getting it on the neck-ring seal where you couldnÂ’t lock that helmet. In training, we had orange juice get on our neck-ring and the only way they could get the thing locked was to go back and take the neck-ring apart and clean the residue out of those locking dogs. They took the whole helmet apart and cleaned it out. ThatÂ’s the only way we could get it to work. That would bite you in lunar orbit, because I donÂ’t know how to do that; I donÂ’t know how you take that neck-ring apart.

Duke: Even with all those problems IÂ’m glad we had something to drink.

Young: Yes, I am too. Now whether it has to be orange juice, I donÂ’t know. Maybe plain water would do. In fact, for the first EVA, water was what I had in mine. I drank the bag the day before. Maybe they could fortify the water with the potassium, if they insist on that being there - or maybe there would be a pill you could put in there. I donÂ’t have any idea whether it would make any difference whether you did it or not.

Speaker: They should be able to make that valve so that it doesnÂ’t leak.

Duke: They overdid it.

Young: It does exactly what itÂ’s supposed to. The trouble is every time you catch your microphone in it and pull back it pulls the valve forward and it works just like itÂ’s supposed to, and when you let up on it, it stops. But I mean itÂ’s sort of a rock and a hard place. If the microphones came around your nose you wouldnÂ’t have this interference problem with the thing but that would be a big redesign.

Slayton: I donÂ’t think it would be worth it.

Young: I think they could make a little soft cap that you could pull off with your teeth because you sure donÂ’t want it leaking on you at zero gravity.

Duke: That was really terrible.

Young: It could drown you. Charlie was in there with a helmet full of orange juice when we were coming down to PDI.

Slayton: Was it your plan to leave the helmets on once youÂ’d landed or go straight out for EVA?

Young: No, no, we were going to take them off.

Slayton: So we could put a cap on there that you could take off after you take your helmet off.

Young: Take it off, just prior to donning your helmet for the EVA. Yes, with your hands.

Duke: ItÂ’s a piece of cake getting out of those suits. It sure fills up the cockpit; they seem to be fatter than all those old training suits. We stowed them back on the engine cover, but we still had enough room to do everything.

Young: When I unstowed the hammock and climbed on the top of the suits, I wasnÂ’t sleeping on a hammock, I was sleeping on a bed because the suits were right underneath me. The suits were up into the hammock about 3 inches. So I wasnÂ’t suspended, I was laying on top of the pressure suits. ItÂ’s kind of an unusual position because it - it gets right up under your back.

Duke: As I reported, the first two nights I took a Seconal. It helped me. I slept really well all three nights on the lunar surface.

Young: The first night I was really warm and I had taken all the gear off and hung the FCS and the WMS up to dry and slept in the sleeping bag with nothing on. I woke up in the middle of the night and my feet were freezing. So I turned around and put the ISA over my feet and went right back to sleep. Worked like a charm. But the next couple of nights I slept in the LCG because it was really cold at night.

Duke: Chilly at night. You needed a sleeping bag. Even with the LCG on, you needed a sleeping bag. You didnÂ’t need it when you started to sleep but by the middle of the night, at least, IÂ’d wake up in the middle of the night and I was cold and I wanted to get in that bag. The hammocks were great.

Young: Yes, I thought so, too.

Duke: We had too much food. Dave said that they ate everything. But we couldnÂ’t have possibly eaten everything.

Young: We did our best; we did pretty good on them. I thought we were only getting two meals a day and I thought we did eat pretty much of everything, as the log will show. I think we left out the frankfurters or something else like that.

Duke: IÂ’d like to say "atta boy" right now for John Covington coming up with those new procedures. Since we slept first at least I think it was, John. The Lunar Surface Checklist, his part of it was just outstanding. It was reorganized in real time and we never had a feeling that we were pillar to post in that checklist. We had to flip pages but it was all flowing well and once we got in it, it led us in right back where we were back in sync by the time we got the prep card that we used, the cue card. He had done a lot. Those things were well organized and I thought those set of procedures for the preps and posts flowed smooth as glass.

Young: Yes, I do, too. We might as well take the prep and post all in one bunch. Every time we took the suit off - itÂ’s real handy that the thing is standing up by itself in one-sixth gravity. ItÂ’s really handy for you to close the zipper up to lube the pressure zipper and get those connectors before you put the thing away for the night. On the second and third EVA, because everything was really getting dirty, and I donÂ’t know whether itÂ’s a real problem or not or an imaginary problem, we were really getting concerned about whether we were going to be able to do things like fasten the connectors. So we were taking special care to lube everything and, therefore, we ran out of lube.

Duke: We had one left for the zipper on EVA-3.

Young: I think you should have some more lube in case you do get to a situation where as youÂ’re doing your last donning, something is not working right and you need to go back and lube it again to make sure.

Duke: No. Not only did we use the lube but we used water and the towels to wipe around the outside of the connectors. And the wrist rings - it wasnÂ’t in the 0-ring part that was so stiff - it was the mating surface between the suit and the sliding ring.

Young: Yes. ThatÂ’s been remarked on before. Somebody said they taped their wrist ring but that seems to be like a kluge. I think they should come up with something that keeps the dust out of the wrist ring. Maybe an over flap that you Velcro on the other side of it to keep the dust out of there because I just donÂ’t think you should have a problem donning and doffing. We really got a lot of dust and I donÂ’t see really any way out of it when youÂ’re picking up a bag on the Moon and youÂ’re holding a bag and CharlieÂ’s dumping the dirt in there, the dust goes all over the place and itÂ’s just as easy for it to go down your shirtsleeve as not. The fact is we had both dirt and rocks underneath the flap that you raise to get the glove open.

Duke: Well, to pinpoint, EVA prep, PLSS donning and checkout went great. That little beauty is just what we expected. It worked just like the procedures, followed straight through. We felt as if we were on time during the whole donning.

Young: Yes, we didnÂ’t think we were behind anywhere.

Duke: We didnÂ’t have a clock to see.

Young: What we had planned to do pre-flight was to have the mission timer running and we had our time line blocked out, so that for each sequence that took, say 20 minutes, weÂ’d know where we were on the time line and we wouldnÂ’t have to keep bugging the ground. They wouldnÂ’t have to keep bugging us either to speed up or slow down. We didnÂ’t have to do anything over, but, on the first one, I forgot to put the drink bag in until after I got my suit on. And you cannot put the drink bag in with the suit on. Charlie put it in and I helped him stuff it down and it wasnÂ’t in good enough.

Duke: Well, it went in, but you couldnÂ’t drink out of it.

Young: I turned my head while we were outside, pulled the valve over, got it down in here somewhere and never could get to the valve. I had it down in my neck ring somewhere. I mean, I tried. I was down in the suit scrounging around for it, but I could never get there.

Duke: Cabin depress - We used the overhead valve and it was horrible to reach in training, but in the one-sixth gravity it was nothing; just right up there and got it. I really felt familiar with those procedures. That square filling we did really paid off, IÂ’ll tell you.

Young: Sometimes Charlie and I could reach the valve on the PLSS and sometimes we couldnÂ’t and there didnÂ’t seem to be a reason why. But, in the main, we tried to help each other in the vehicle to turn the oxygen on and off. And as everybody has remarked, once you get the gear on the only thing you can do is get out of the spacecraft because youÂ’ve run out of room to do anything else. Let me say something about donning and doffing. We used a different procedure than that in the time line in regard to coolant. We used only Lunar Module for cooling during donning and doffing and we only used the LCG pump. We got the other hoses out of the way and sort of semi-stowed. We didnÂ’t say anything about them changing those procedures in real time, but it kept us significantly more hydrated than we would have been had we been on air coolant. What we would do is we plugged into the water and got it running through our suit, cooled the LCG down, and then climbed into the pressure suit, which took a big hunk of energy. And then immediately plugged the water in and pushed the pump in and gave it a squirt of water. At various intervals when we started to feel like we were running out of cooling weÂ’d push the pump in for maybe 30 seconds worth, give it a squirt of water, and not use air coolant all the time that we were donning and doffing. IÂ’m sure thatÂ’s the best way to work that system because it keeps you from sweating. It keeps you from doing the kind of cooling that must dehydrate you.

Slayton: You didnÂ’t run the pump continuously, though.

Young: No, I think that IÂ’m going to recommend that they change the procedures to do it this way. I first noticed this when we were running long durations of suit runs and we only had air coolant. You really feel bad after you finish a long duration of suit run with only air coolant. If you run with water coolant you feel okay. Now I donÂ’t know why that is, but it sure is a fact. Because five hours of running in the suit with just air coolant you suffer the next day. Five hours of water coolant down at the Cape training you can go the next day and run another one. You donÂ’t feel like it very much but you can do it. I think it may be a difference that if you can keep your body from sweating you sure should do it, and running that water coolant for donning and doffing was ideal, plus it had the added advantage of getting those two big long cumbersome hoses out of the way, which were right in the traffic area. ThatÂ’s really a son-of-a-gun when it comes to doing things like changing comm out in the Lunar Module and we made that change in real time because it was actually like we practiced in the mockup down at the Cape. I sure think it paid off. I think itÂ’s a better way to do it. I just donÂ’t think long-duration air coolant in the pressure suit, which we were in a lot of the time, which makes your body sweat and you have to replenish the water by drinking it. You donÂ’t always have time to think about doing that; it may be a significant factor in getting the crew back hydrated, as opposed to being dehydrated. Okay; cabin depress, beautiful.

Duke: In 2 minutes we could open the hatch just like they said.

Mattingly: Did you have a lot of stuff come out of the hatch equalization like we had?

Duke: No, we saw a few dust particles fly out but that was all. To do the actual depress we used the overhead valve and just left it open. I never noticed much floating that way. The LM was extremely clean. You know how many screws and little washers and things we found floating in the Command Module. I guess maybe on the whole flight we found five in the LM the whole time.

Young: It was extremely clean until after first EVA, and then from then on, it was really dirty.

Mattingly: Yes, I was thinking more about the subsequent depresses. Did you have a lot of rocks and crud flying through there?

Young: No, actually it cleaned the floor off pretty good. When I opened the door, the dirt would go "zip" right out.

Slayton: Do you think one-sixth g is enough to keep that stuff from going out that top hatch?

Young: You know all that Velcro on the floor, it just gets caked with dirt. You canÂ’t stand on the floor. I guess it didnÂ’t hurt anything, but I know when we donned the suit, we had our jettison bag down to stand on like everybody said, but our feet and hands and our arms were all full of dust when we put the suit on. So it was all going into the suit. And it didnÂ’t seem to bother anything. You donÂ’t know how much itÂ’s going to bother. You donÂ’t have a feel for whether itÂ’s going to give you a problem or not. ThereÂ’s just no way to avoid it. The second EVA, we had in places that much dirt and dust on the floor and thatÂ’s after cleaning each other real good.

Duke: The place where most of that dirt came from in the place you canÂ’t clean was the strap-on pockets we had.

Young: We got smart after EVA-1, and before we got in, we closed the flap. But the first time, I got in with that flap open, and my pocket caught on a hatch sill and when I came in with that right leg, the dust just flopped out. You had a pocketful - you had a contingency sample right in your pocket.

Once outside we were talking to each other. I guess Charlie and I really were the only two people who really had a good handle on how the prep was going because the ground didnÂ’t have high bit rate. We felt perfectly comfortable. When our coolant became adequate Charlie talked me out of the door. I guess I had a little more trouble with the line up than you did.

Duke: It is because of the hatch. The hatch is only about three-quarters open. I canÂ’t back up any more. Once you get the hatch full open, you can get centered in the hatchway. I could do it but you couldnÂ’t.

Young: I never had. any concern about getting in or out. It was just a question of knowing what I was going to get caught on. Once I got outside I had our new LEC strap. The adjustment feature on that strap is at the top of it. We marked it pre-flight how we wanted it adjusted. I donÂ’t think it was adjusted that way because when I lowered the ETB to the ground, it landed on the ground, and we were trying to avoid this. We didnÂ’t want any dust on the ETB so we could keep the dust out of the cockpit. We had to adjust it on the later EVA. What I recommend is that they put the adjustment strap on the bottom so if you do land on a slope or if you land and you stroke a gear and you want to readjust the strap you can adjust it to your eye level on the ground, and not while you are hanging on the ladder with one hand.

MESA deploy was nominal and it appeared to me to shake the whole vehicle, but Charlie said he didnÂ’t notice anything. When I got down on the Moon the environment was just as good as I thought it was going to be. The second thing I did was reach down and pick up a rock just to see if I could do it and sure enough that was a piece of cake. So I reality thought we were going to be in business with that suit mobility. I went around to the MESA and the first thing that I noticed on the MESA was that the height was too low, but I didnÂ’t do anything about it at the time.

I loosened the TV blanket and opened it. Charlie came on outside about this time. We didnÂ’t have to move the TV to the tripod because we werenÂ’t getting TV. We deployed our antennas. It had been easy for us to deploy our antennas when we were on the surface, but once we were in one-sixth gravity the only way that I could reach up to deploy CharlieÂ’s antenna was to have him come over and grab hold of something like the ladder or the Rover and bend over so I could get my hand up to it. I just couldnÂ’t get a hand on it. That took a little more time because we had to move over to a new position. I donÂ’t think the communications would have been bad if weÂ’d left the antennas stowed. I ended up breaking one because we forgot to re-stow it. IÂ’m not so sure we shouldnÂ’t leave them stowed.

Duke: My egress went right by the checklist - with the breakers turned off the lights and open the hatch full. I came right on out It was even better than I expected and easier to do. I felt right at home the minute I hit the ground. I just felt right at home. Then I went over to the MESA.

Duke: My first job was to take out the drill and the core stems and I couldn't. The way the MESA was hanging you never would have gotten them out. It was almost like you were looking at it flat. Normally it sits up, but it was almost all the way down.

Young: The MESA was supposed to be adjusted to the green line and it wasnÂ’t adjusted to that green line. It was about 18 inches lower than the green line so the MESA was lying right on the ground. Maybe this is a pre-flight problem. If it had been adjusted to the green line, which is where we adjusted it to, it would have been in perfect position.

Duke: It was hanging down on about a 60-degree angle. It looked like the spec high case to me. That is where the vehicle is high and you have to drop the MESA down to reach things. It looks like you should pull the black strap to adjust it because it has a pulley arrangement, and you think that is the mechanical advantage. You pull, and pull, and pull and it is locked down. The strap you want to pull is the green one up above. This strap has no mechanical advantage at all except the gravity field. We finally figured that out after about five minutes. We wasted five minutes.

Young: I recommend that they adjust it to the green line where it belongs and that late in the EVA training program we adjust the MESA. We had been checked out on how to raise and lower the MESA height, but I forgot how to do it.

Duke: We did it a long, long time ago.

Young: It was too far back from when we did it the first time.

Duke: Maybe in training Stoner and his people could give us various cases, instead of the flat floor case, which we always get to keep you familiar with it or put a decal on it that says pull here for adjustment. That snowed us.

Young: It not only snowed us, it snowed the ground, too. It took them a while to figure out how to do it and thereÂ’s five minutes down the tubes.

Inspection of the vehicle showed that none of the things had pre-deployed to which I may add a hearty "thank God." What had happened is that both walking hinges were open. The walking hinges were released just like on 15. We had to put those back. We didnÂ’t have any more trouble with it until we got the front wheels deployed. On CharlieÂ’s side the left rear wheel was knocked down and locked so Charlie gave that a pull, and pulled that down. When we got a little further down, the wheel came down and locked on the foreyard chassis so we locked both of those. When we got it on the ground two hinge pins were a little extended. I think they were partially inserted, but we had to insert one on CharlieÂ’s side and one on my side. I donÂ’t remember which two they were but we had to insert them.

Duke: The wheels popped open just like they had done in training. ThereÂ’s a gold sleeve collar arrangement that has a couple of pins in it so that when the wheels are fully out those pins lock in to hold the wheels in place. That was what was not locked. All you have to do is push on the wheel to extend that mechanism and it locks right in place.

Young: Other than that, the deployment was easy.

Duke: Sorry we didnÂ’t have it on TV.

Young: When we got it on the ground Charlie and I just picked that baby up end moved it over so we didnÂ’t have to back it up.

Duke: One thing IÂ’d like to comment on here, is that I think they over designed the Velcro holding the seat down on the LRV. A two inch or one and a half inch wide piece of Velcro is wrapped around on themselves to hold the seat in place. On my side I started pulling the Velcro to try to get it off of the outboard handhold and the seat and all I succeeded in doing is picking the vehicle up off the ground. The Velcro wouldnÂ’t come loose. Then I tried a couple of snatch loads and by snatching it I eventually got the Velcro off. It was a hard job getting that Velcro off. They really over killed that one.

Slayton: I gather you thought all the Velcro was difficult to work or excessive.

Duke: Yes, I did.

Young: For what we were using it for it was. Although we had a couple of cases of these in-house devices that we will talk about later, where the Velcro was burned off. The glue that attaches the Velcro melted or something, - like on the padded bags, and on the TV sunshade. And there was something else.

Duke: It was just like youÂ’d expect, Deke, when you wanted the Velcro to work, it wouldnÂ’t work and when you didnÂ’t want it to work you couldnÂ’t get the son-of-a-gun off of there. If youÂ’re going to do that PLSS harness thing, you need a bigger piece of Velcro and an easier way to attach those bags, because we lost two SCB because the Velcro came loose, which allowed the bottom to flop and then it fell off. One of them ended up on the Rover, wedged in between the rear wheel and the aft pallet and we recovered that one but the other one with the little sample SCSC fell off and we never did see that. I was surprised we didnÂ’t see that going back, John, on the return traverse, but I never did see that thing.

Young: Oh, I know why you never see it, it didnÂ’t fall off. When we got back, the SCSC bag was lying on the footpad of the Lunar Module.

Duke: Oh, it was?

Young: Yes, it wasnÂ’t on the back of the Rover like we planned to put it. I donÂ’t think weÂ’d have been able to use it. Okay, LMP inspect LM and pan.

Duke: Well, I got out and looked at everything and it didnÂ’t look like the struts had stroked at all. The engine bell was in great shape and had not impacted anything. Although there was about a 50-centimeter block just to the right of the engine barrel, and it extended above the engine barrel, the bell was still off the ground and had not hit anything. I did the pan as per checklist and also added some photos that Houston wanted us to do of the peeled paint, the shredded wheat, and on inspection we had that one panel on the minus Y side above the APS propellant that weÂ’ve already commented about. There was another little spot above the - below quad 4 that I took a picture of, and then we took the pictures of the steerable, but I never saw anything on that steerable that would give me any hint of what was wrong.

Duke: Apparently just the servo electronics was gone on it.

Young: Your pictures came out good too, Charlie. It just looked like that thing was just welded down.

Duke: I was really expecting to see a "remove before flight" pin up there but there wasnÂ’t. It was perfectly clean, but it just didnÂ’t work at all in yaw. I had to go back and take a picture of the cosmic ray and I forgot to look at the decals that time, but the next time we came around and looked at them they were all black. And then later on they decided to have John move the cosmic ray.

Young: Okay, the far UV camera. I didnÂ’t have any problem with off loading it. I was expecting trouble from the bags. It came loose and I expected trouble picking the thing up and getting it off and I expected problems with keeping it out of the dust. I was able to get around the front of the vehicle and hold it over my head. It was easy to carry that weight around. The place that we had to mount it in the shadow was in a small subdued crater with about a three to four degree slope, and probably it was more than that. The only way I could get the camera level was to really step down on two of the legs, push them clean down out of sight in the dirt, with the other leg sitting right on the surface. And that was the first problem I had with it. The second problem, which was a continual one was the battery cable. Even though I didnÂ’t deploy the battery too far out in the sunshine the battery cable had a mind of its own and insisted on staying about 14 inches off the ground around the camera where I was walking, even though I pulled the whole thing back in there. So, every time I walked around the camera I had to pick my feet up to avoid the battery cable and two or three times I tripped over it, but fortunately it was the battery that moved and not the camera. To move the camera in azimuth completely destroyed any levelling. As the mission went on, to move the camera in azimuth got harder and harder and finally it got so hard that every time you moved it, it would pick the camera up off the ground and destroy the level. I had to re-level it after every setting and that took a lot of time. And in some cases, because we were really in a hurry I didnÂ’t get the level where I would like to have had it, as far as being perfectly level. Adjusting the level, using the wheels, just couldnÂ’t compensate for both the slope and picking the thing up every time. From that standpoint, it was pretty bad. There was something wrong with the azimuth - it just got stickier and stickier. It didnÂ’t work at all like on a training model or either a qual model. I donÂ’t know what it could have been. But, I would devote a reasonable amount of time to levelling the camera after each setting. I think we have probably devoted three to four times as much time as weÂ’d allotted for each setting. I got behind in doing that. Charlie recommended that we put the UV alignment in both checklists so that either guy could do it.

Duke: I had to interfere with JohnÂ’s conversation with Houston to get that going. But itÂ’s a place to save time, because the LMP really doesnÂ’t have that much to do on the load up. Get the cameras configured, and the films stowed, is about all. So, itÂ’s good to have some kind of cross talk within the checklist so you donÂ’t have to interfere with the other guy. Apollo 17 probably wonÂ’t have that problem with it since they donÂ’t have the UV, but sure enough something will be there, and so they really should have those TV and LRV power-up procedures in both checklists.

Young: ThereÂ’s something else I donÂ’t really understand about the far UV camera setup and the alignment that weÂ’re doing in real time. Except for the geo-corona and the Earth, we changed every target in real-time, I do not understand that. After doing it for months, we changed every target in real time. There were at least two targets that they called up that were pointing and we got the alignment with this tough azimuth change and they were pointed right at the Lunar Module and you know, when I turned the thing around I was taking a nice picture of Charlie looking out the window. In my opinion, thatÂ’s an inexcusable waste of time on the Moon, doing that kind of thing, but we did it anyway. I just canÂ’t believe weÂ’re doing that. There was one setting, when we turned that son-of-a-gun around and it wasnÂ’t even clearing the ladder good. I donÂ’t understand that. IÂ’ll never understand that, but thatÂ’s what we did. Golly! Changed every setting after we practiced these things for months and we specifically reviewed them and, in many cases, when we started all this business back about a year ago. About one out of four would be pointing at the Lunar Module and weÂ’d say go back and research this as we donÂ’t want to be taking pictures of the Lunar Modules, surely. So, they had them all changed, and I figured that before we launched, we had them all down in real time and by golly if we didnÂ’t change every target. I canÂ’t imagine that s6 hours could do that to you. It would on most targets but I find it hard to believe. Plus we had to move the camera after each EVA, and I donÂ’t understand that either. It was in the sunlight after the second sleep period. The bottom half of that square box the spectroscope looks out of was in the sunlight and after the second EVA, the upper three inches of the cassette handle was in the sunlight. Of course, that could clobber your film because if the heat goes down that cotton-picking barrel like it probably does, and heats up that film, that wipes you right out. I donÂ’t understand that either. That would be a tragedy to lose that for something like that. But we may have.

Duke: Everything went well on the LRV load-up until I tried to get the power connector on from the LRV to the LCRU. The flight gear is really stiff and the cable had a set in it and it was just tough for me to get that Astromate connector on. It took a lot longer than it had in training, but it finally locked in and that was really the only problem that I had on the front end of the load-up. The antennas went on slick, the TV, the GCTA, every-thing checked out correctly.

Young: The cables were what was stiff.

Duke: YouÂ’d get the connector aimed and to see that you were aligned, you had to put it in place and get over to the side, and when IÂ’d do that, the cable would spring out again.

Young: On the back end, the old pallet just fell off the quad 3 and fell onto the LRV and went right in place and locked right in place and I donÂ’t understand it. Just a piece of cake. And the only problem I had was that on one of the penetrometer pins, the wire pulled loose so that instead of having a loop, I just had a long piece of wire. I was able to wrap the wire around my hand and pull the pin. The pin was pretty hard to pull and it was being pulled at an angle since the loop had broken. But, nevertheless, it came off. ThatÂ’s the only problem I had loading the LRV. Unlike the training equipment, both the shovel and the rake were easy to lock on because it tells you which way to turn the thing to lock it and how to put it on. We didnÂ’t transfer pallet number 1 at the beginning of EVA, we did it at the end.

Duke: Yeah, at the end, we did the Bio-canister. It was easy; man, that beauty came right out of there at one-sixth gravity.

Young: In one-sixth gravity, it comes right out and in one 'g', itÂ’s a son-of-a-gun. I can honestly say I had as much trouble putting the flag together in one-sixth gravity as I did in one gravity. My main concern was with the TV sitting there watching us, that weÂ’d end up with the flag in the dirt and us standing on it. As soon as I picked up the lover leg of the flag, I dropped it and I was in the dirt. So, I was bent over holding the flag up with one hand and I picked the thing up and put it together.

Okay, the ALSEP off load, Charlie!

Duke: Yes. It was right below eye level, both pallets.

Young: Is that where it was in one gravity?

Duke: It looked exactly like it was the same level as in the training building. I flipped the switches for the descent ECA temp monitoring, and the pallets just came right out with no trouble. About this time I think you were doing something with the far UV. Anyway, we got them all on the ground and put the pole together and by that time you had come back. We got the pole together and RTG tools out and dropped that down. I didnÂ’t quite get it locked on before I started changing it. I thought IÂ’d lost the dome, but I started over again and made sure that the tool was locked in and then the dome came right off with no trouble.

Offloading of the fuel was just like weÂ’d done it in the trainer. It wasnÂ’t red like itÂ’s painted in the training model, it was black.

Young: Was it black, Charlie? I was wondering what color it was.

Duke: I couldnÂ’t feel any heat coming off of it. One problem I had on carrying the antenna mast, it apparently looked like it was locked on the RTG side and I could not pull it up any more and it looked locked to me though there was about a quarter or a sixteenth of an inch between the little half dome and the mast. But it still looked locked, but as I was bouncing out there I had gotten to about 25 meters and the RTG package fell off. It bounced into a crater. I thought IÂ’d blown it then because of those very fragile fins on the RTG. But, I looked at it and it hadnÂ’t been damaged at all. In fact, it was hardly dusty. I put it back on and made sure I had it locked the next time. And the only thing I can say about that to make sure that thing is locked. You donÂ’t want any gap between the post and that little half dome. If you do, the thing is not locked in. You cannot feel it snap in like the training gear snaps in. Some of the hardest work I did was carrying that beauty out to where we finally deployed it. I highly recommend that you put that thing off to the left side of the LM if you can, if your experiments will allow you to. Because on lift-off, that MESA blanket we had went sailing right straight out front just like it did on 15 and impacted about a 100 meters out in front of the LM. It could have been another wipeout on the central Station, like it almost was on 15, so thatÂ’s probably a good idea to put it off to the left.

Young: Yes, and I donÂ’t know why that MESA blanket did that. Maybe we should take the MESA blanket off and stow it inside. I donÂ’t know which MESA blanket it was.

Duke: I donÂ’t either. So, I think youÂ’re wasting your time pulling those blankets off. If you just put the ALSEP off to the left you donÂ’t have that problem.

Young: ThereÂ’s no way it can get there.

Duke: When I got there I separated the packages and lined them up.

Young: There sure were a lot of rocks out at that site, and it wasnÂ’t the worldÂ’s greatest ALSEP site. After practicing for months on a flat terrain, with no craters, we ended up with a lot of craters and a lot of rocks and a lot of holes. You sort of had to thread your way as to where you were going to put each piece. IÂ’m not too sure it was a good idea to have a rock between the central Station and the PSE right out there at the end of the LSM. IÂ’m not sure how that affects the data.

Duke: They said it was all right, John.

Young: They said they were having thermal problems with the PSE.

Duke: Already! ThatÂ’s because thereÂ’s dust on them.

Young: Yes. And, because I kept falling over the rocks as I walked by it.

Duke: ThatÂ’s the only flat spot I could find.

Young: I know, Charlie. You did a good job. I donÂ’t see how you could have done any better.

Duke: I wasnÂ’t about to carry the ALSEP all the way to Spook Crater.

Young: IÂ’m glad you didnÂ’t carry it any farther. If you had, when we did the ASE deployment, weÂ’d have been down in a big hole. We just barely missed being down in a big hole as it was. Let me say something about the cosmic ray experiment. When I deployed it, I forgot to look at the temperature decals on them. IÂ’m sure as a result of our three revs, plus our time enroute, all those temperature decals were black before we ever got there. I canÂ’t imagine that anybody would think they could put something on the side of the Lunar Module and expect not to see more than 1140 degrees F. It saw 140 degrees F during Trans-Lunar coast because the temperature was plus or minus 250 degrees. They could stand about 120 or 130 before the experiment is ruined. I never could understand why they were worried about thermal. When I pulled the ring, I pulled it down three inches and it pulled completely loose. And it was just the upper 3/32 of the hole that was visible. It was supposed to be completely gone. We got all but the 3/32s before the ring came off. On the next EVA, I moved the experiment down to the plus Y strut to keep it out of the sunshine. I still think that long before we ever got to the Moon, that thermal problems were a factor and, that experiment was gone. I donÂ’t know how you could. have avoided that unless you put a lot of insulation on the detector or put it in the MESA.

LetÂ’s say something about the LRV checkout. When we first turned on the LRV we didnÂ’t have any rear steering. I donÂ’t know why because all the switches were nominal. I didnÂ’t move any switches. We were on secondary power; 15 plus or minus volts was secondary. We tried it on both of them. After load-up, when we got back in the second time, it all worked. I donÂ’t know why it didnÂ’t work the first time. I wasnÂ’t particularly concerned about the rear steering not working because we sort of planned to not use rear steering. In fact, if the rear and front steering had gone out we planned to go in a straight line as far as we could, get out, pick the thing up and point it in the right direction and keep right on going. On that particular site that would have been hairy. WeÂ’d have been doing a lot of getting out and picking up. But I still think if we had to do it for any reasonable amount of time it would have been a lot better than walking.

Duke: The experiment came right off and the connector went off. This was something it hadnÂ’t been doing in the early part of training. It went right on. I unrolled it and took the probes out. We had one Boyd bolt stick. I had to use the tool twice on it, but, it finally came loose and broke the box apart. I thought I had a pretty good place for the heat flow. After I had deployed the probes, I went back and got the drill. I assembled the drill and the stems went on and the drill worked like a champ. I started out real fast and I think I ran into a little rock. It went right on through that rock, or whatever it was, and I had no trouble. I think I was way ahead of the time allotted to drill the hole. I had planned to use my foot to hold the stem while I took the drill power head off. That didnÂ’t work at all and IÂ’m glad I had that new wrench. The wrench was just ideal. I could easily put it on and hold it with my leg while I twisted the drill head off. I got all three sections in real easy and I put the probe in with the rammer. Everything worked as advertised. About that time John said there was a cable loose over here. I looked around and the dadgum thing had broken off. So, I stopped on the heat flow at that point and went to the deep core.

Young: My feeling is that kind of thing is almost unavoidable. If the cables are way up off the ground you never knew whether you were stepping on them or not. When you are standing in one-sixth gravity with a backpack on, youÂ’re looking about three to four inches in front of your toes, unless you make a positive effort to look over at them. Every one of those cables had a memory and were all at some distance off the surface. If you want to make that whole business compatible with the suit operation when you run into the cable, It will be strong enough so that it does something like pull the central Station a little so that you know youÂ’re moving something. Maybe it should be such that it can stand a tangle and trip. That cable evidently was really flimsy. Some cables allowed you to do that. I was pulling the active seismic experiment around and that cable was on there so taut that I actually moved the central Station and had to go back and adjust it.

Young: I didnÂ’t pull the PSE cable, but I had the feeling that if I had, it would have moved the central Station. The RSM cable was very strong. But, that cable wasnÂ’t. I didnÂ’t know IÂ’d done it. I had no idea. And I certainly didnÂ’t mean to.

Slayton: We should have helped you from the ground some on that. You can go back and look at the color TV and we could see it. The Cap Comm was looking at the black and white set and isnÂ’t very obvious on black and white. Besides the time delay, we had the wrong flight plate up.

Young: ItÂ’s an 8-second time delay for the whole thing to get through. You can probably do a lot of damage in 8 seconds.

Slayton: ThatÂ’s right. It probably would have been too late anyway. But, it might not have been.

Young: It was sure a tragedy. If it had just moved the central Station before it broke. I would have stopped right there and fixed it.

Duke: Everyone of those cables had a memory. Every one of them were off the ground.

Young: A guy really canÂ’t lift his feet too high around a central Station, because when he does, he kicks dirt all over the PSE. It was a bad thing, but I still think it was incompatible with the kind of limitations that we are working with in the pressure suit. I blew it. I tripped over the whole thing, but I didnÂ’t, even know that I had done it. I was completely out as far as the active seismic experiment when I looked around and saw this cable following me.

Duke: It wasnÂ’t your fault.

Young: It was my fault. I didnÂ’t know I did it. The PSI deployed normally. I had some misgivings about where we put it, but, we levelled it and deployed the thermal skirt. And, we padded it down so that it would be level. The last picture I saw of it shows that it is up off the ground a little bit and I donÂ’t know what to tell them about that because we sure made an effort to make sure it was flat. We did go back and check it three or four times during the mission, but it is up off the ground on one side. Maybe that will give them a thermal problem. With that rock between the PSE and the central Station walking on one side or the other of that rock would tend to get a little dirt on the skirt. But, it was level and they should be getting good data. The LSM deployment was nominal in every respect, except for the problem that Charlie had deploying the curtain.

Duke: The Sun shield flight curtain.

Young: It was easy to align it. The ASE deployment was nominal. The way we did that was we drove the Rover out to the central Station and then drove out on a heading of 290 degrees in a straight line for 100 meters. When I went back to reset the UV taking the Earth pictures of the geocorona I fouled up that procedure and had to do it all over again. Even if we had done it right, Charlie would have been out at the site and what we intended to do was take the Rover and run a little recon to pick a good place, if there was such a thing. I have the feeling that no matter what place we picked, it would have impacted one or the other experiments because of the blocks and because of all the craters out there. I donÂ’t think in a reasonable time that we could have picked a better site than we did. ItÂ’s 20/10 hind sight for a man sitting on the ground with photographs to say, well, you should have put it over there. ThatÂ’s no good. We drove the Rover on a heading of 290 degrees, turned around, and came back. Then when we deployed the ASE. IÂ’d say it was within 1 foot in 100 meters of being straight down that line. It was as the photographs show. The ASE went just like it was supposed to. The mortar package was no trouble to deploy or install. One of the legs on the mortar package hung up. I couldnÂ’t extend it. I can show whoever wants to know how that pin was hung up. If I had a pair of tweezers, I could have gotten in there and pulled the pin. But, with a pressure-suit glove, I couldnÂ’t get my fingers in there to do it. So, we deployed it in the ground with three legs extended. It was levelled with the ground on a heading of 333 degrees. Both it and the mortar package were pretty much level. I think it will work satisfactorily. Arming of the mortar package at the end of EVA-1 was no problem. That was a one-time item. I have some misgivings about being able to deploy the mortar package with any amount of slope. Fortunately, the place where the mortar package was sitting was almost level. And, it was the only place around there that was. If it had of been tough regolith like it was in a couple places, we would have never gotten it in the ground.

Slayton: Core sampling, Charlie.

Duke: The first core tube I put on the drill went right on and locked in place like it was supposed to. I was able to push it in maybe half of a stem length. I started drilling and it seemed to auger in on me. It went in much too fast. I held back on the next two. The only problem I really had was when I tried to get the drill head off to add. another stem. It seemed to be real tight and didnÂ’t want to unscrew. The drill didnÂ’t want to unscrew from the stems and that happened on all three sections. I really donÂ’t know why. I checked and it didnÂ’t look like I was gauling (?) any of the threads. The stem threads on the stem side all looked clean and werenÂ’t gauled. When I put them stem to stem, they went together real easy. But, when I tried to get the drill head off, it was hard to get off. But, once I broke it loose, it unwound easily. I had to really make a conscious effort to make sure that the drill stem did not unscrew in the ground. It really wanted to back off. When I tried to put the wrench on it and unscrew the drill, the whole thing would turn and I really had to make an effort to stop that. It went into the ground great. Once I had it in, I did 15 seconds of clearing the flutes. While I was doing that, I tried to pull up and the thing just came right on out of the ground. I pulled up four or five inches. It was coming out easy. I said, man, it is going to be a piece of cake to get this out of the ground. I took the drill off and capped the top. I stopped the flute-clearing activity and then I tried to pull it out of the ground. Boy, I couldnÂ’t budge it. I took the drill head off, capped it, and used the jack on it. The jack worked as advertised, and it brought that beauty right out of the ground. I was amazed. I had to jack it out almost seven feet before I could pull it out of the surface with my hands.

Young:G You said the bottom layer was white.

Duke: I donÂ’t remember the details right now. Since we lost the heat flow, they said they wanted to see if the holes had collapsed. I took the rammer and dropped it in the hole. It fell out of sight. Only the top 3 inches of the rammer were visible. It was perfectly open all the way down. Breaking it apart over in the Rover was nothing. It worked just as advertised. We propped it up and retrieved it after we had ended the EWA. IÂ’m glad we had that extractor because the extractor works great. I had the same problem with it that I had in training. Every time you picked it up to try to set the C-clamp back down again, the bottom plate would shift on you. It wanted to walk clockwise with you. What I did was put my right foot on the plate and jack with my left hand. That worked great. It held steady then and it speeded up the process.

Young: I tell you we werenÂ’t disappointed about this EVA. WeÂ’d been practicing with real deployments on the training gear. Every time we deployed it, weÂ’d have some kind of problem that nobody had ever seen before. Well, we had the same thing in flight. I think all the problems we had with the training gear oriented us for our real-time problems.

Duke: We had ALSEP deployments and that was really good training. I felt right at home with every piece of gear we had. We loaded up for the geology and I changed out the magazine on my camera. We got the bags ready to go and off we started.

Young: Somewhere in there, the ring came off the 20-bag dispenser.

Duke: That was right at the beginning. Several small screws that hold the aluminum plate and the ring that holds the bags to the camera backed out and the whole ring fell off. This allowed the bags to still be held to the camera but to dangle such that you just couldnÂ’t reach up and pull one off. We discarded that set of bags. Luckily we didnÂ’t throw them away. We put them on the Rover and used them later on, because we almost ran out of bags. I recommend we have several sets of those 20-bag dispensers, because if you have any failure like that, it really can slow you up. The best thing to do is just discard that set of bags and get a new set. But, the way we were using them, we couldnÂ’t afford to do that.

Young: I dropped the bags off the camera out of that place. During the first EVA, we had them taped on, remember? On the second EVA we forgot to bring the bags back in and taped them on the same for the third EVA.

Duke: I had them taped on both cameras, but the tape came up. The gray tape doesnÂ’t hold too good on that metal surface.

Young: You need some mechanical latch to hold them on. Probably something that springs up and down. You need some way to keep them from falling off. Mine fell off on the second and third EVAs at least 10 times, and that really slows you down. Twice they fell off when I was driving the Rover. They just vibrated out. Fortunately, it fell on the seat or we would have lost a couple of 20-bag dispensers right there. I didnÂ’t realize that I dropped them until after they were gone. It seems to me like thatÂ’s simple fix. The trouble is, they fell off in training, Deke. I kept saying, "Is this flight?" Everyone said no, the flight one is really stiff and it wonÂ’t do that.

Duke: I think it happened more in flight than it did in training.

Young: The system is supposed to handle that and it didnÂ’t.

Duke: We had no trouble. After Station 1, we saw Spook. We went by Spook and it was impressive. We went by Buster and Buster was a heck of a lot bigger than I had imagined; 50 meters. It was really a blocky crater. We kept going and we felt as if weÂ’d landed a little bit west of where we were supposed to and that the distances would be shorter.

Young: They didn't turn out to be.

Duke: We got to a crater that ...

Young: It was really a big crater.

Duke: ... turned out to be Halfway Crater. We werenÂ’t to Flag; then, we got back on the Rover again and started to Flag. The reason we realized that we werenÂ’t there was because the distance was only about three quarters.

Young: Halfway Crater looked as if it was 100 meters across.

Duke: The craters all looked bigger.

Young: Flag Crater is 300 meters across. What weÂ’re saying is we couldnÂ’t tell the difference between a 100- and a 300-meter crater. And, thatÂ’s the truth.

Duke: I think itÂ’s the sharpness of the land and the degree of the subduing of the craters.

Young: You know, I would have been willing to buy that for being Spook Crater. But it wasnÂ’t.

Duke: When we got to Flag, there was no question. Man, this is a big crater. It was a lot bigger than the one where we stopped first. We found the right place and found Plum. Plum was smaller than Buster. Plum and Buster were supposed to be the same size. Buster was just gigantic compared to Plum.

Young: I expected Plum to have a bright rim around it like it has in the folders. It didnÂ’t have a bright rim around it, but when we dug down two inches, there was all this white material.

Duke: John took the scoop and pushed it down there and dug away on the rim of this little crater. There was about three centimeters of gray regolith and right under that it was just whitish white ash. It was white when we put it in the bag. I donÂ’t know what it looks like right now but, it was white when we put it in the bag; just ash white.

Mattingly: Some of the other things that looked white when we got them inside were pretty black.

Young: If that doesnÂ’t look white, IÂ’ll eat every bit.

Speaker: It was sure marshmellowy when we got it.

Duke: That was one of the unique things in the navigation system on the Rover. ItÂ’s superb, absolutely superb.

The map holder is worthless. You can get in there with a 16-millimeter camera, your Hasselblad, and your knee. By the time you get in, youÂ’re pushing the map holder out of the way. ItÂ’s sitting there and you canÂ’t even see the maps. What I ended up doing was taking one with the headings and the topography on it - the 1/25 thousand - and I wedged it in between the 16-millimeter camera and. the staff. ThatÂ’s a great place for the map because you can look up at it and see it. You can reach up and pull it out if you have to and just push it right back and wedge it in place. Unfortunately, our maps and photographs didnÂ’t look anything like the topography.

Young: ... no resemblance to where we were.

Duke: The Rover nav was working so good, and we could see our landmarks. So, we had no trouble navigating. We really didnÂ’t need the maps; but, where they were stowed, they were useless. If you need a map, then you better pick one that you think you will use and stick it up there on that camera and just wedge it in there. That worked great.

Young: We couldnÂ’t handle the maps.

Speaker: Say something about Rover driving out there in zero phase.

Young: Man, IÂ’ll tell you that is really grim. I was scared to go more than four or five kilometers an hour. Going out there looking dead ahead, I couldnÂ’t see craters. I could see the blocks all right and avoid them. But, I couldnÂ’t see craters. I couldnÂ’t see benches. I was scared to go more than four or five klicks. Maybe some times I got up to six or seven, but I ran through a couple of craters because I just flat missed them until I was on top of them. And, I donÂ’t recommend driving in zero phase. They keep saying they want it included in the traverse and I specifically cautioned them not to include it on the traverse. But, there is no way for us to get to Flag Crater without driving in zero phase. It sure is grim. The other direction was about twice as good. I saw my tracks on the way back. We were doing seven, eight, nine and ten klicks. It wasnÂ’t as good during the traverses where we were going down-Sun. I was tacking a lot of times. But, when you got to a ridge, you couldnÂ’t tell if it was a drop-off, or whether it was a smooth, shallow ridge. In a couple of cases, you couldnÂ’t see there was a ridge. I didnÂ’t care for that much. ItÂ’s kind of like landing an airplane aboard ship where youÂ’re looking right into the Sun and you canÂ’t see what youÂ’re doing. You just go ahead and land it anyway. It is not normal, but on occasion, you have to do it; but, youÂ’d just as soon not.

Duke: We found mostly breccias out there. Sometimes they looked like tough breccias to me. General rock type and the blocks, as John said, were numerous. We had two types of regolith, a white underneath and gray. We also found some crystalline rocks out there. We did a rake and itÂ’s a great big plus for that rake. That really is a good sampling, tool.

Young: There‘s no doubt that those rocks probably came down first. Then later the dust fell and covered the whole thing, because they were sure covered up.

Duke: Okay, travel to Station 2. Going back, we just followed our tracks. The slopes were small in that traverse. The local slopes approached five to ten degrees, I guess. We were going up and around a couple of the craters.

Young: You know, we never encountered any of these features on the geology map. They were mapped as scarps or steep features that they said weÂ’re going to have to drive around or over or maybe we could pick up outcrop. We just never ran into those. And I think thatÂ’s because those guys were reaching for and pulling out features that werenÂ’t there. I mean, I looked for these things and sure enough if you really imagined it, you could see something there. But, I think with that scarfing we had, they were reaching far it. Because they sure werenÂ’t there in the real world. If they were, they looked like every other slope that was around there.

Duke: I think the whole way out there, we were in this series of rays from South Ray.

Young: You couldnÂ’t tell where one took up and the other left off.

Duke: The rock types you could classify as just angular to sub-angular and with very little filleting around them. There were some rocks from North Ray that had fillets developed and I think that might be a way to tell one from another.

Young: The - the rock from North Ray was a little more rounded and not as sharp. We had rocks from North Ray and South Ray in the landing site. ... only by the angularity and the old rocks have more zapped craters and are rounded off.

Mattingly: You are saying that those are North Ray rocks which have fillets? ThatÂ’s a hypothesis.

Young: Yes. ThatÂ’s a guess. But, I would say that is the best way to tell them apart.

Duke: I bet you five bucks thatÂ’s right.

Mattingly: I thought maybe you had traced them on the way up there.

Young: Of course, some of them could have been from Buster, too.

Duke: When we got to Spook, John had that LPM to do. I took the pan and went scooting on up to Buster and took a partial pan of the interior. That was really an impressive crater. We had some 3- to 5-meter blocks that covered 70 or 80 percent of the bottom of that crater. And they trended up to northeast slope and out the southwest slope of the crater. They were large meter-size blocks on the northeast rim. Around on our side, the southeast side, we didnÂ’t have anything greater than half a meter. I sampled some rocks there and did a radial sample of about half a crater in diameter and then about a crater in diameter back toward where the Rover was. We got an X-number of samples and hopefully theyÂ’re the right ones. IÂ’m not sure Buster was a secondary crater. If it was a secondary crater, it was really a big breccia in there, because it was a big crater. It was a primary crater and it had excavated into bedrock down there.

Young: I think Charlie got some rocks from Buster Crater that came from the bottom.

Duke: The rocks were very similar to the ones that we saw at North Ray. We sampled rocks out of South Ray Crater up on Stone Mountain, but the rocks down there looked very similar to the rocks up at North Ray and the rocks at Buster. So, there could be some underlying formation that goes across the whole Cayley Plain. That might prove to be totally wrong, but at least from a color inference, those black and whitish rocks were everywhere; they were everywhere, I think.

Speaker: Say something about cooling when you were driving on the Rover.

Young: It is best to operate on minimum coolant, which is practically no flow at all when youÂ’re sitting on there. The rest of the time I was running between minimum and intermediate coolant. That was sure adequate for any of the work that I did the whole time, except there in the last EVA. I was on the Rover and I forgot to reset it, and minimum and intermediate seemed to be pretty good there, because I think weÂ’re getting a high Sun angle there toward the end.

Duke: One thing about the Rover, which will come up more on the next EVA, but on these local slopes that got steep, you really had no sensation of climbing a steep slope. But, you really knew it when you were going down-slope, a steep one. The thing could have gradually increased to a 25-degree slope and I donÂ’t think we would have realized it.

Young: The pitch meter broke off almost before we started up Stone Mountain. The pitch meter face fell off. The only way youÂ’d know it is that youÂ’d only be making 8 kilometers an hour, youÂ’d have the thing fire-walled. On a level, you could do 11 V_max and, downhill, if you took the power off, you could do as much as you wanted to if you let the thing go.

Duke: Going upslope, the pitch meter needle was working and it was pegged at the top.

Mattingly: And what was the scale?

Duke: Twenty degrees. At one point, I looked over there and the thing was pegged at the top.

Young: Charlie said it was pegged and I said, "Oh, Charlie." I didnÂ’t believe him. I didnÂ’t feel as if I had a sensation that it was being pegged. I tell you one thing, we wouldnÂ’t have gotten out and worked on a 20-degree slope. You just canÂ’t handle it. Although, I think maybe we did when we were standing in that crater. We might have been on a 20-degree slope.

Duke: I think so, too. Rock type change - Buster - as I said, we sampled whatever the major rock type there which was in the crater and on the rim, plus soils and all.

Young: Let me say something about the LPM. The thing that surprised me was that there were no problems reading it with the Sun. We also anticipated that it would be hard to wind up; but, it was easy to wind up. The problem was to un-stow it. After each deployment, it got harder and harder to pull loose and I thought on the last one that the cable might bust before we got it completely unwound. Just shows, you never know what your problem is going to be up there. It just got harder and harder to pull free. But, it was easy to wind up and itÂ’s easy to set up and easy to operate and weÂ’d probably have made a few more readings if anybody had been interested.

Duke: That was all real time, too. We did. some readings that werenÂ’t in the plan. And we dropped out some stops, which was no big deal. Let me talk about the 500-millimeter targets, John, just a little bit. I took those of Stone and. the only thing that was significant about Stone was these lineations that I described and they trended southwest. It looked as if they started at the east and gradually climbed upslope and over the ridges and you could just follow them all around. They did not follow any contour lines or any of the bench lines. They seemed to transect all of that stuff. They were very closely spaced during the first EVA when I took the 500. But, later on, we looked back over there on each EVA and as the Sun changed, the spacing between these lineations changed.

Young: Not only that, when we got up on Stone Mountain I didnÂ’t see any lineations.

Duke: You couldnÂ’t see it.

Young: I don‘t know what that means, but they sure weren’t there.

Duke: At Flag Crater in the undisturbed regolith, you could see lineations that were mostly northwest, southeast. It looked as if the regolith was loosely compacted and the particles were standing up and the lineations were formed by the Sun shining on these particles; casting little slight shadows. I think thatÂ’s really what those little lineations are. I took some pictures of that. I hope itÂ’ll show up. That was the feeling I got. If you just kicked dust over it, it'd mask it and be gone. I think maybe those things up on the mountains were the same kind of feature but on a more gross scale.

Young: On Hadley Rille, it might have been.

Duke: But, the 500 worked great. It was a little bit more difficult to stabilize it than I thought. I used the range sight and it fired off the pictures. We could see into Stubby and we could see into the southeast wall of Stubby. You could not see the apparent flow that is on the photograph. It was not apparent to me looking at it, I thought. We, got some pictures of it. ThatÂ’s all I can say. I jumped off at Station 3 with the camera. and John started off. I got into position and I squeezed the trigger on the handle, which was easier for me to do than punch the button. I could tell the camera was running by the vibration and just watched John do his thing on the Grand Prix and I think we did 2½ minutes worth of film and then called it quits.

Young: I didnÂ’t get up to any great speed, maybe 10 clicks at the most, but the terrain around there was too rough and too rocky for that kind of foolishness.

Duke: It was, to do that.

Young: I was driving around craters and a couple of times I did a brake out there on the turn to show them how it looked. Driving the Rover, when it brakes out, is no problem. All you have to do is cut back like you do in snow when the backend brakes out. The trouble is when you cut back, you overshoot and you may end up going the other way. But, at least youÂ’re not going, you stop. YouÂ’re relatively slow when you brake back the other way. We never did - on a couple of brake outs, when we were in a hurry and we may have had only three during the whole time, but the thing changed direction as much as 90 degrees on what was still brake out like that, and then cut back into it. We ended up going back this way 100 degrees. But the thing would be stopped. I never did have the feeling that weÂ’re going to turn over. Although, one time we had a couple of wheels off the ground and went sideways. I wasnÂ’t too impressed with that.

Duke: One time I thought I was going to be under the thing. That was on EVA-3 and weÂ’ll talk about that later. But - picking up core tubes, IÂ’d left them standing on the little tripod. I picked them up and ran back to the LM. I didnÂ’t bother getting back on the LRV, just put them in the bag. At first they were a little bit too long for the bag and I couldnÂ’t get the Velcro down on the bag. But, once we got then inside and tamped it in, the snaps snapped and the Velcro Velcroed. We brought those beauties back as advertised. The solar wind deployed just like in training, perfectly nominal; shoved it into the ground. The cameras worked nominally, even though we got them real dusty and it was hard to see the setting after the EVAs. We wiped them down with a wet cloth inside and changed the film outside. When we changed the film they were extremely dusty and yet the camera never quit.

Young: Not only that, I guess according to the photo guys, we got some dust inside on the reseau. The camera still worked although it left a couple or three streaks across the film. It ruins the PR value of the things, but it sure doesnÂ’t hurt the data. But the thing worked. I thought we might have had a hang-up.

Duke: I did, too.

Young: But, it didnÂ’t.

Duke: Once or twice I watched the film and when IÂ’d squeeze the trigger itÂ’d sit there and it hum and then itÂ’d go.

Young: There was only one time I had to change your camera, to change the red into the white. The rest of the time those things were working and it was great.

Duke: We had good luck with the cameras, just great.

Young: It sure worked a lot better than that training gear. If it worked like the training gear, we wouldnÂ’t have taken very many pictures.

Duke: I went on Aux water during EVA-1 sometime during the Grand Prix. I didnÂ’t feel the cooling change at all. During the ingress, I took the pallet up and I just jumped up on the ladder. I didnÂ’t feel stable enough to jump up on the ladder with the pallet in my hand. I jumped up to the first rung and John handed it up to me and then I felt stable enough to go on up with that big pallet. You could stick it inside and put it over against JohnÂ’s left-hand stowage area and I still had plenty of room to get in and take all the gear off of it and hand the pallet back out. John looked real stable to me coming up the ladder with the bags in his hand, the rock bags, and the SCBs, and the SRCs. We had no trouble with ingress.

Young: The technique I used, IÂ’d stand at the bottom of the ladder and bend down and spring and I could get up to the second rung of the ladder with either the SRC or an SCB in my hand. That is really the way to fly. You feel like Superman jumping up off the ground like that. The way I would do it is, IÂ’d put a bag on the LEC down at the end of the ladder, take the bag in my hand and leap up the ladder, hand one of the bags to Charlie, and then pull up the LEC and hand the other bag to him. That saved me a trip back down the ladder. It was real easy to pull up the LEC. You just lean against the ladder, do like this, and the thing would come up and then youÂ’d grab it down a little further and you could pull it up in three or four-foot grabs, even though the actual weight of something like the ETB was probably a good 30 pounds with all the cameras and everything in it. It was real easy and IÂ’m glad we went to that LEC because once we got adjusted, we never got any dirt in the cockpit from it. Although we got so much other dirt, I donÂ’t know if it made a lot of difference. LetÂ’s make sure we got all these items. Yes. I had some difficulty attaching the power cable from the central Station, but, after finally fiddling with it and pushing and tugging, it went on. Okay, I guess the recommendation on the LEC is to put the adjustment strap down at the bottom of it instead of at the top. Charlie said we need more sample bags, thatÂ’s true.

Duke: Our Rover seat belts were great. The adjustments that we had made in-flight in the zero-g airplane turned out to be just exactly right. So, I recommend that the Apollo 17 guys have one-half hour of parabolas and get that seat belt adjustment and have them mark it down. ThatÂ’s what we did and we had a little mark on them and it just worked perfect.

Young: The TV operations in both checklists - The penetrometer cone fell off. Antenna alignment on the first EVA was no problem on that 180 headings. It was easy to position the Earth in there, but IÂ’m sure glad we had that training that we had with the IESD over there in the stack looking at that thing to get a feel for the problem, because it really was a problem at high Sun to get the Earth in a picture because itÂ’s so dim. WeÂ’ll talk about that later, too. My yo-yo broke.

Duke: Was that on the second EVA or the first EVA?

Young: Second one, because I was getting tired and thought IÂ’d use the tongs and put them on the yo-yo. I pulled it out and picked up a rock with it and put it back and it came back about that far. We brought it back, so it should be around here somewhere.

Duke: ItÂ’s at the house. I forgot to bring all that stuff.

Young: We should give it to them and see whatÂ’s the matter with it. But I donÂ’t think with the soft regolith that you need a yo-yo. You just carry the tongs out there in one hand and stick them in the ground. ItÂ’s more convenient to do that than it is to pull the yo-yo out. So I donÂ’t think weÂ’re in trouble there.

Slayton: What broke?

Young: It just came back to about here and then quit.

Slayton: Oh, I see. The recoil mechanism.

Young: When we were opening the battery covers, of course, we had to dust the LCRU (they got dusty all the time), the LCRU did badly when they opened the battery covers. We had to park the LRV such that it was rolled into the Sun a little. That may have given them a thermal problem they didnÂ’t know about. We parked it at the right heading, but when we opened the battery covers the dirt just flew up in the air and came right back down on the batteries. We had to dust the batteries. I could see why they got dusty. ThereÂ’s hardly any way to avoid it. That was on the first EVA before we lost any fenders. We were relatively free of dust in the front of the vehicle other than what we accumulated on the front of it as we drove.

Duke: When I got into the Rover, I mounted the Rover, reached over and grabbed hold of the handle below the camera and jumped in. When I did that my arm would go out and knock the seat belt out of its little loop and most of the time it ended up over on the console, which was no problem. But, one time it ended up down under my leg and I couldnÂ’t reach it. So, John had to get it. I donÂ’t know how we could tighten that loop up or something, but it was a recurring problem with me, four or five times, anyway. John never had that problem with his on his side. I think his loop was a little bit smaller than mine. And a little bit higher too, and that was probably the reason.

Young: On three or four different occasions on the first EVA, we pulled the purge valve off my seat; either fastening it or unfastening it from the seat belt pulled the purge valve pin out. I didnÂ’t know how it was happening. Charlie never saw how it was happening. We never experienced it before. What we did on the second EVA was to turn the purge valve around so that the plug came out this side. I found during the suit integrity check, when we pressurized the suit prior to egress, I could pull it that way. So, I said "LetÂ’s do that and get it out of the way" and thatÂ’s probably the best way to take care of that problem in real time. The ground was going to suggest that we tie the purge valve with a piece of string and that would have just been something else to pull loose and get in the way. We really had too much stuff to do. So, I think that was an adequate fix, a real time fix, for that problem. The other thing they said about the purge valve which I really didnÂ’t understand, they wanted to bring mine back for analysis. We donÂ’t know whose purge valve is whose, so I donÂ’t think that was a rational request to bring one back opposed to another one. But they got them both back, I think.

Duke: Yes.

Young: It was just catching on something. I donÂ’t know what.

Duke: I think it was your seat belt, John. It happened when you dismounted.

Young: Yes. It must have happened when we dismounted, because we found it lying beside the Rover.

Mattingly: ThatÂ’s surprising, those things are hard to pull out, unless you just get them lined up right.

Duke: He did it three times.

Young: I did it three times on EVA-1 and had everybody nervous. I didnÂ’t know what was going on. I thought we followed the time line on EVA-1 pretty good. We didnÂ’t allow for the extra time it took to do the UV camera setup and alignment. We just didnÂ’t have that in there. That put me behind Charlie when he was going out to the central Station and also for things like ingress. It was just before ingress when we reset the camera that the son of a gun really was hard to turn in azimuth and I didnÂ’t think I was going to be able to turn it.

Cabin repress was nominal. PLSS refurbishment was nominal. We were able to stow my PLSS in the stowage Station with the harness on it by moving the harness up and stowing it. IÂ’d say this about our EVA-1 pre-donning: The first thing that happened to us that really slowed us down on EVA-1 was that CharlieÂ’s tool harness fell off, and we both had PLSSs on. It was really tough to get the tool harness up off the floor or off the side and underneath Charlie and put back on him with both PLSSs on. We should be able to belt that tool harness on so it wouldnÂ’t fall off until such time as somebody makes a positive motion to get it off. ThatÂ’s really a drag, that tool harness. Not only could we never keep it from falling off, but we could never keep it on once we got it put on. We could never keep it in the vehicle; we always had to tighten it down. We tightened it down repeatedly inside the vehicle. Once we got outside the vehicle, weÂ’d have to tighten it down for the last time. PLSS refurbishment was just as advertised. We managed to keep the PLSSs level because we were fortunate to have landed fairly level. But one of the toughest things we did was stow the PLSS with the tool harness on it in the CommanderÂ’s Station and get it to lock. ThereÂ’s no way to guide that thing in there. There should be some way to guide it into the stow position. You do not have any idea. ItÂ’s a blind connector into that pin. ItÂ’s just by hit and miss that you get it in there and stow it. What would be a minute job, if you could see what youÂ’re doing, takes five to ten minutes. ItÂ’s necessary because you want to get that thing up and out of the way and make sure itÂ’s secured. The Apollo 15 crewmen were continually turning around and knocking it off the bulkhead, and thatÂ’s no good.

The EVA-l debriefing - I thought that the questions were pretty good, with the exception of the kind of questions where they asked you what rock did you pick up at what Station. Nobody can ever remember the answer to that. After youÂ’ve gone through eight Stations, all the rocks look the same. You canÂ’t remember which rock you picked up at which Station.

PGA doffing was the usual problem of getting the PGAs off. As we said before, we lubricated the zipper when we got the PGA off, and then fastened the zipper, and pulled the seals down tight. It was after EVA-1 that we noticed the wrist rings were getting clogged with dust. There should be some way to cover those wrist rings (the things that snap in and out), the sliders that keep them from getting full of dust because it makes them practically impossible to work. After EVA-l, we experienced a little stickiness with the helmet. Not a great deal, so we didnÂ’t pay any attention to it. When we took the suits off, they were all dust covered, up to our knees, even though we kicked our boots off as we came up the ladder. We took the suits off and put them into a jettison bag, pulled the jettison bag up over the legs, and laid them on the couch like everybody else has done. We put a bag down on the floor to stand on, but that did not keep us from getting dust all over the place. One of the problems was that we had dust on the bottom of the PLSSs even though we wiped it off, and dust on the side of the OPSs for some reason. They were lying on the floor. As a result, when we got in our. LCGs, we were sort of standing around, like I had one foot on OPS and one foot on the midstep and was sort of leaning back against the shelf on my side. Charlie was sort of standing with his foot on the ETB and one foot on the midstep, and we were up out of the dirt. Our hands were black when we started taking each otherÂ’s wrist rings off. We got our hands dirty and I didnÂ’t get the dirt off my hands until after weÂ’d landed. Washed them up good. I donÂ’t think Charlie did either. We managed to get dirt on the bottom of the LCGs, on our sleeves, and on our hands that got into the suits. It was just a little dust. I donÂ’t know what problem it entailed, but it sure looked like it might become a problem. The only thing I can say is we stayed out of the dirt as best we could. It was all over the floor. Just hardly any way to get off of it. We even had some on the midstep where weÂ’d laid the ETB up there. It was dust covered too from dropping in the dirt because the LEC was too long to keep it off the ground.

Duke: Another 8 ounces on the stowage list in the form of a jett bag would be an outstanding addition to the LM stowage.

Young: For the second jettison, we loaded up the buddy SLSS bag. In training, the buddy SLSS bag had been adequate. Unfortunately nobody had counted on us landing, eating a nightÂ’s food, getting up the next morning, eating a breakfast, and then trying to stow all those food wrappings in the buddy SLSS bag. We just barely jammed all that stuff in there. It was really overly full. To tie the bag up, we finally ended up wrapping tape around it. It was really a marginal operation. Plus the other jett bag would give you something to stand on. I donÂ’t think the buddy SLSS bag makes a very good jettison bag. It just wasnÂ’t big enough for the volume we had to put in it on the second jett.

Duke: On the second jett we had already jettisoned the LiOH canister. We were supposed to have an LiOH canister in that bag.

Young: I know, weÂ’d never made that.

Duke: Never made that.

Young: The eat and rest period, I think was nominal. Charlie took a seconal for the rest period the second time.

Duke: I had a tough time getting my mind out of gear. I knew I was tired. I had a tough time getting my mind unwound. That pill helped me do that. I donÂ’t really think it helped me sleep any better.

Slayton: Could you eat comfortably without feeling pressed?

Duke: Yes.

Mattingly:(?) One-sixth 'g' makes a lot of difference. You got a gravity feel. You can stabilize stuff. We could put our bags down upon the console and let them for a while to get the air bubbles out of them. ThereÂ’s air bubbles in the LM. IÂ’d say 20 percent of the volume in the food bag was air.

Young: You could squeeze the air out and drink it bubble free. That personally helped my digestion a lot because IÂ’m not much on eating bubbles.

Duke: I thought there was adequate time to eat, 45 minutes or an hour.

Young: That additional time we put into the Flight Plan really helped. There wasnÂ’t any time we were loafing during EVA prep and post, thatÂ’s for sure.

Duke: We sort of combined things. WeÂ’d start the PLSS, the O₂ refill, the 10-minute charge. WeÂ’d maybe get that going and IÂ’d cut a bag and John would be piddling with that, things like that. We sort of combined things. We ended up with one spoon. I put my spoon where I could be sure to find it and it took me two days to find my spoon. We had to eat in series. We only had one spoon for two days.

Slayton: It seemed like we over ran most of those EVA post-activities by about 1 hour.

Duke: Did we?

Young: Take a look at the checklist, Charlie.

Duke: I think the debriefing took longer than we had planned.

Slayton: The first one did. ThatÂ’s why we pushed the other one back.

Duke: We really werenÂ’t hustling.

Young: Body elimination really slows you down. I mean to tell you it does. It's necessary.

Duke: We had some real-time readups which took some time. The ETB load-up, I did the night before. That took 15 minutes.

Young: ThatÂ’s right. Charlie did the ETB load-ups the night before. Something else we were doing that we got out of the way the night before, we serviced the drink bag. That took five or six minutes, and. we sat it aside to get the bubbles out.

Duke: That was about a 15-minute job. That was pretty close to the ETB load-up time, 15 minutes, which was about right.

Young: We also lubed the zippers during doffing, instead of on donning as we had in our checklist, because it was just more convenient to do. The suit was standing up there right in front of you and all of the connectors were visible. It would sure help to get the zipper lubed and, also, it helped for Charlie to load that bag up.

Duke: ItÂ’s just a relaxed time to do it. You can double check and make sure you got the right film magazine and everything you need in that bag.

Young: It is pretty self-evident what magazines youÂ’re going to need. Like, if you donÂ’t use up the one from the EVA before, you know for sure youÂ’re going to take it right back out with you. So, you just leave it in there.

Duke: They were updating that real time.

Young: Yes.

Donning was hard. IÂ’ll tell you, pulling that restraint zipper was really rough. After we got the dust in the zipper, closing the zipper and locking it was pretty, pretty bad.

Duke: Give me a new restraint zipper.

Young: Restraint zipper and, also, closing the gloves and locking once we got the dust in there was really bad. It didnÂ’t hurt wrist mobility, but it sure was hard to get them closed.

10.2 Second EVA

Duke: EVA 2 Prep Activities. PLSS donning and checkout, I think, was nominal.

Young: Yes.

Duke: We had the updates to the Flight Plan to get us back into the proper checklist sequence for EVA 2 prep and that flowed real smoothly I thought. We didnÂ’t do the computer stuff. The eat period went okay. We knew we were nominal for EVA 2. Except for the donning problem already talked about the suit seemed to really get tighter. I shouldnÂ’t say got tighter, but it held the same. I had about a .15 the first time we did it. The third EVA I had the same thing if I recall.

Young: .15 to .2.

Duke: Cabin depress went okay. Water boiler start-up and everything like that went great.

Young: Certainly had a problem with resetting the UV camera on EVA 2. We had to move it out of the Sun and realign it and reset it.

Duke: The equipment transfer to ETB went down okay, with the cameras. Jettisoned the buddy SLSS bag with the trash.

Young: We had to take special care not to get the buddy SLSS bag near the UV camera, so we dropped it over near the MESA.

Duke: LMP Pan. I forgot which strut I took it off of. No trouble with the camera. About this time I think we looked at the CRE, and it read off scale, High Hot. They made John move it about that point. So we got a little out of sequence with our checklist.

Young: We had the realignment of the camera. ThatÂ’s probably what deleted Station 7 on our traverse. ThatÂ’s probably what did it. Were we behind when we started EVA?

Duke: No. I donÂ’t think so. I was reading the transcript back in the room there. The reason they took 7 out is because they wanted to add more time at Station 10, around the LM. I think we really threw them off on that. They were all zeroed in on that vesicular basalt that turned out to be glass. I guess we really never regrouped from that.

Young: They really were looking for that vesicular basalt to support their theory.

Speaker: There isnÂ’t any vesicular basalt up there.

Duke: Not one piece. I called - this looks like a piece of basalt under near the engine bell. They said - get it, even if you have to get down on your hands and knees to get under there to get that rock. From then on they were boresighted on that basalt. WasnÂ’t nothing but glass. Equipment prep - We loaded up - no problem there, was there, John?

Young: No. No problem with the load up.

Duke: Except that I really recommend those SCBs have a positive lock on the top. In fact, I would recommend a positive lock on the top much like is on the back of the hand tool carrier, so you wouldnÂ’t have to worry with that Velcro strip at the bottom. That is really a pain, trying to have the other guy bend over, youÂ’ve got to pull down on the bag and out, and then with one finger try to thread that Velcro strap in through that loop back there on the bag.

Young: I recommend they put some Velcro on the pack where the tool carrier goes too. Remember the time when it fell off inside the Command Module, that really slowed us down - on me getting down and getting back up to get it hooked up on you, that took about five minutes. Remember when your buddy SLSS bag fell off?

Duke: Yes.

Young: I mean your tool carrier fell off?

Duke: Yes.

Young: We both had PLSSs on and, man, it was just very - itÂ’s very difficult to bend over and pick that up.

Duke: That was the hardest thing in the whole prep - getting the SCB onto the guyÂ’s tool harness. I donÂ’t know what the Apollo 17 has to do, but you could cut the weight down on that PLSS harness if you wanted to. No need to carry the tools there any more. The hammer fits right in the pocket.

Young: And itÂ’s more accessible to the guy that wants to use it.

Duke: All the coring operations were done off the back of the Rover.

Young: You can carry the cores in the bag.

Duke: LRV Nav Initialization. We came right back with it. The thing just worked great. The whole traverse. I take that back, half the traverse. Once we left Station 8, for some reason the thing didnÂ’t update in range. It updated in bearing but it didnÂ’t update in range, distance.

Young: We left Station 8 and our bearing back to the LM was 007. That was the last bearing that we got back to the LM. The LRV traverse down south across Survey Ridge and over and down again. It was downhill all the way to Stone Mountain. In fact, from the Lunar Module you could see all the way down to Stone Mountain. You could see the whole traverse route except for behind the ridges. The ridge lines really had a lot of blocks on them. On Survey Ridge we saw this blocky region down there, and I was really glad to get out of there. It not only had a lot of blocks but a lot of craters. We were hard pressed to make any really fast time down that way. In fact we were hard pressed going down to make any good time at all. Driving cross-Sun was no problem. You could see everything. At least you could avoid it.

Duke: We were pretty well located all the way. You could see Survey Ridge, and we had intermittent hummocky ridges between us and Survey. But as you topped each one you could look down and see Survey.

Young: All the way to Stone.

Duke: You could all the time see the Cinco crater and Crown crater. So we knew where we were going and the trafficability looked like a piece of cake.

Young: We started up Stone Mountain, and somewhere in there our pitch meter face fell off - on the Rover. And we werenÂ’t able to tell exactly what we were doing. Although the needle was still working, I didnÂ’t notice that till after we got up on Stone Mountain. Except for the fact that you slowed down to 8 or 9 kilometers an hour while you were going up the mountain we just didnÂ’t have a feel for the slope. It was only after we got out to Station 14, turned around, and looked back at that hill we just came up, that we got the idea we might have bitten off at least as much as we could chew. That was a steep ridge in places. There were breaks in the ridges. There would be a ridge crest and it would just drop out of sight. On the way back down, even though I was following my tracks, I proceeded very nervously. We just didnÂ’t have a feel at all that we were going to be going down a slope like that.

Duke: At Station 14, we parked in a crater because we had the feeling that the Rover was just going to slide off down the bill like it did on Apollo 15.

Young: So we backed around and parked in a crater.

Duke: There we had mostly the rocks we sampled that were identifiable as South Ray ejecta.

Young: Yes.

Duke: And secondary craters. In fact, the Blocky crater was a secondary crater.

Young: South Ray is classic, because the blocks were all distributed away from South Ray.

Duke: We had some crystalline and some breccias. Soil samples we picked up shovel fulls. Every time we sampled a rock we got some soil.

Young: It was at Station 11 that the penetrometer cone fell off the first time - when you went to get it out, the two-tenths cone.

Duke: I stuck the penetrometer into the cone and pushed as hard as I could. To me, it felt like it seated. I locked it. As I pulled it out though, it was locked just enough to allow the thing to come out of its holder. Once it got out it fell on the ground. It was right next to the Rover, so I could bend over and pick it up.

Young: I donÂ’t remember seeing any crystalline rocks at 4, Charlie. I thought they were all breccias.

Duke: Maybe it was 5 when we took the first one. Yes, it was 5.

Young: A pure one type rock, I didnÂ’t see any of those at 4. Even the crystalline rocks could be one rock breccias. Remember like that anorthosite we found at the San Gabriel mountains - where it melted itself against itself.

Duke: TheyÂ’re figuring that out right now.

Once we got the penetrometer working, John helped me get the thing on and locked, it worked as advertised. The readingÂ’s going to be spiked. You couldnÂ’t apply a steady force on it. YouÂ’d start leaning on it and youÂ’d lose your balance. YouÂ’d come up off of it, or, it would give. When it would give, itÂ’d give fast enough to allow the little spring, that you push on, to back off. Then IÂ’d push on it again and itÂ’d bottom out. It ought to be apparent. Every time I did it I tried to call it out. I think theyÂ’ll see some spiked readings on the drum. There was just no way to avoid that. I tried two or three different little techniques, and every time it worked the same way.

The double core we pounded right in. That was an easy operation on the back of the Rover, to assemble and disassemble. Fredo gets a great big case of beer for thinking of that way to stow that rake on the back. We didnÂ’t do the padded bag sample.

Young: Not at 4. We did at Station 11.

Duke: Yes, 11.

Young: Travel to Station 5 was downhill all of the way with the brake on. Driving downhill, I did it with idle power and sometimes put on the brakes. ThatÂ’s all we had to use. I wasnÂ’t going too fast, maybe four or five kilometers. On a straight stretch might get up to ten. But coming up to a ridge, IÂ’d slow back down again 'cause I had no idea what kind of slope was on the other side of that ridge. You could sure tell that if you let that rascal loose that sheÂ’d go down that hill in a big hurry. When you got the Rover up to about ten clicks going down a hill, itÂ’s just like riding a sled on ice. No matter which way you turn the wheel the thingÂ’s just going straight. I mean itÂ’d be sideways, but still be going in a straight line downhill. Lot of mass there.

Young: Station 5 - Station 5 was the first place we picked up what I thought was a crystalline rock. It was an angular rock. Was Station 5 where we worked in the crater?

Duke: We were in the crater, but you also had a grab sample.

Young: It became apparent after we were at Station 4 that we werenÂ’t going to get what everybody thought was true Descartes, because we kept picking up what looked like South Ray ejecta. The only way we could think of to do it was to sample towards the South Ray side of the secondaries, or find a primary and sample there. It just wasnÂ’t clear that any of those things were primaries because of the way those blocks were distributed in them. TheyÂ’re all on the side away from South Ray. Maybe there were a few primaries up there, but we sure didnÂ’t see any, did we?

Duke: No.

Young: It makes you think that thereÂ’s a lot of craters on the Moon that must be secondaries. This is the first time that weÂ’ve had a clear-cut example of it. A lot of those craters on the Moon must be secondaries as opposed to impact craters, because they donÂ’t look any different except for the block distribution. As many secondaries as the South Ray must have made in that region it is sure clear there must be a lot of craters that are not primary impact craters. I mean a lot.

Duke: We sampled around the rim of this 15-meter crater.

Young: We dug into it trying to run across some rocks, but it was all soft regolith What we picked up looked like - with the exception of a couple of rocks which were probably from the secondary thing that got thrown back in there - were probably all dirt from Descartes.

Duke: I think so.

500 Millimeter. I took that, not here but up at Station 4. I took pans of Baby Ray, South Ray, and the west half of Stubby. Stubby was a very old subdued, tired looking crater and it really wasnÂ’t much for regolith. I got pictures of Stubby but there was not lineation, not evidence of outcrop, no evidence of anything except just old tired looking things.

Young: I got the feeling from looking at Stubby that it was there after Descartes was because of the way the slope was off the mountain around Stubby. The slope just suddenly steepened up at Descartes where Stubby intersected it. That could be erroneous, but thatÂ’s the only reasonable conclusion that I could come to. The rim of Stubby bisected or cut off some of Stone Mountain.

Duke: Right. We did. everything we were supposed to do and moved on to 6, still downhill.

Mattingly: You never said anything about when you went up there where you could tell when you went from the Cayley up on to Stone Mountain.

Duke: No, couldnÂ’t recognize that.

Young: DidnÂ’t even notice the slope.

Mattingly: No texture difference?

Young: There was a slope difference, but we didnÂ’t pick it up. Going uphill you couldnÂ’t really tell, there wasnÂ’t much of a slope change.

Duke: Going down, you knew when you were off the mountain, because it was a definite break in the slope, but you couldnÂ’t see any textural difference at all.

Young: Same gray regolith, it wasnÂ’t black regolith. ItÂ’s a gray regolith like it must have been at Fra Mauro.

Duke: Station 6 - we had a fairly decent size crater there, five to ten meters across, with some blocks. If I recall the raking came out pretty good there.

Young: The surface was harder there too, remember?

Duke: Yes.

Young: We skipped Station 7 for 8. That was on a block - South Ray. Ray, with some fairly big blocks. We tried to turn over one boulder and couldnÂ’t budge it. We did get some samples off one side of it. The rake soil was straightforward, the regular sampling was straightforward. It was here, about halfway along, we lost rear drive and rear steering. We didnÂ’t even stop.

We went on to Station 8 and then stopped and let the ground think about it for awhile. I got back in and started looking at switches. They called procedures they wanted to do, none of which worked. I got to really checking the switches, and sure enough it was in PMW-l, that was all. The message there is to see if the switch configuration is normal.

Duke: I must have got it with my seat belt or something.

Young: Your finger or something because thatÂ’s a guarded switch. ItÂ’d sure be easy to get in there, clip with the seat belt and never even know it. Or for that matter, doing anything over there, reaching for the camera, etc.

Duke: The only thing I can think of is that little "T" handle that you lock the belt with. When I reached to pull it off that loop, it could have hit that switch and not known it. The coring - the double core was a piece of cake. At one place it got a little hard, IÂ’ve forgotten exactly where that was.

Young: Station 10 - the one they let me do. I was really beating on that thing. They were hard to go in the ground but easy to come out - all the cores.

Station 9 - we did quite a bit of sampling there. There was something that slowed us down at Station 8. We did something that took quite a while. We traded the bags out.

Duke: Yes.

Young: That took a lot of time. We had an hour at Station 8. We traded the bags out and changed the film. That cost us a lot of time. I donÂ’t know how you get around it. You have to do that. Only thing I could suggest would be CharlieÂ’s idea for the shopping bag wherein you donÂ’t have to change the bag out. You just pick up the bag and go sample with it or something. That really took a lot of time to change those bags out, I was really surprised that it took so much time. I donÂ’t understand why.

Duke: Well, thereÂ’s no way to get that Velcro on. ThatÂ’s the problem I had.

Young: Yes.

Duke: I couldnÂ’t get that little Velcro strap through the loop on the bag.

Young: ThatÂ’s a manual dexterity test. Run the Velcro through the loop in a pressure suit glove. It never works the same way twice.

Duke: IÂ’d get the strap through there, pull on it, and itÂ’d be twisted. The part I wanted to Velcro would be outboard and it wouldnÂ’t turn over.

Young: ThatÂ’s one of those three-handed jobs in frac16; 'g'. You need a hand to stick it through, one to pull it down, and a hand to stick it through and keep it there when you reach around to pull it down and pull it tight.

Duke: ItÂ’s hard to do. We did the vacuum container core sample. That went okay.

Young: Yes.

Duke: The surface sample did.

Young: IÂ’m not sure that thereÂ’s any material on the first one. ThatÂ’s the kind of thing where you sneak up behind a rock, stick it over there, never look at it, and let it rest on the surface. The first assumption you make is that itÂ’s resting on the surface. Nobody was ever able to verify that. I could see the imprint where the legs on the sampler had been but I was never sure that the plate inside had actually gotten down on the surface. You donÂ’t push it. You just let it sit there. YouÂ’re taking somebodyÂ’s word for it.

The second sample, because of the unevenness of the ground, only 20 percent had something on it.

Duke: We closed them up and stuck them in the bag.

Young: At Station 9, we were able to overturn a rock. We were able to overturn it, chip a rock off the top and a rock off the bottom, and sampled underneath. Underneath that surface, the soil was compacted very much like rocks on earth. You could see the outline of the material compacted down. It looked like itÂ’d been sitting there for quite awhile. The etchings on the rock were all on the surface. However long South Ray has been there is how long that rock has been sitting there.

After we left Station 9, the last bearing we had was 007. I forget the klicks. So, I said, shoot, IÂ’ll just take up 030 and meander that way generally to make sure that we intercept our path so we donÂ’t end up west of the LM. We never did intercept our tracks but there was the Lunar Module just as we came up over the hill, about 300 meters out. Went right to it. We had pretty good pad built in. We had the traverse tracks of the 1.2 kilometers out to Flag. We really didnÂ’t have any trouble. We had a set of tracks we could follow back from either one.

Duke: There was never any feeling that we were lost.

Young: No.

Duke: We knew exactly where to go. You could see Smoky Mountain. YOUNG Until we came up over that ridge we never saw the LM.

Duke: Not once we left Station 6.

Young: Yes

Duke: After we left Station 9, there was a crater we passed that was very old, tired, subdued. It was rimless. It was ridged at one end and it was very deep. It looked like a big sink hole.

Young: It had a central crater in it that was elongated that sort of looked like a bend. We did a 360 and Charlie shot a pan while we were going around in a circle.

Station 10. They eliminated the soil mechanics on Station 10 because we semi-dug a trench up at Station 14 - an exploratory trench up there. So, they eliminated that one.

Duke: I did the double core at Station 10.

Young: No, Charlie, I did the double core.

Duke: You did the double core while I was doing the penetrometer. I did do the penetrometer work there with the two-tenths cone, the five-tenths cone all the way out to the deep core site. Came back and then did two plates. Nothing out of the ordinary, the thing worked great.

Young: When we got back to the LM, I didnÂ’t see any trouble with any of the closeouts, did you?

Young: Why donÂ’t you tell all about how you -

Duke: On EVA-1, I got one of the sample bags - the end of it where it is thick plastic or teflon or whatever it is - stuck in the seal. I couldnÂ’t get it locked. But when I opened it back up and saw what was happening, I just moved that bag back in. It didnÂ’t look like the seal was damaged. and it locked right up.

SRC-2 - we put that vacuum sample in and most of the core tubes, JohnÂ’s whole bag. Really packed it full and closed it up. It closed without any problem.

Young: By taking the bags back and dumping them in the SRCs, we could get a lot more bags in. The bag that appeared to be full would generally fill up the SRC. You did that a couple of times. I think thatÂ’s a good procedure because youÂ’d do a couple of things - you save a bag that you donÂ’t need, and you get the SRC full. Furthermore, you get all that bag material out of there that we never quite licked because seems like when you put it in there with a full bag and you close that hatch, close the lid on it, invariably some piece of the SCB catches inside the seal, and messes up the whole business. We used the same procedure to haul up the ETB and the bags and it seemed to work straightforward and ingress was no problem. I think it was Station 8 where we lost the rear fender and that was because I fell over it. I was coming out to help you and I tripped over the thing and it fell off. Avoid those fenders if you can. Every time that wheel came off the ground and went back in and dug in, it was just like we were watching rain. Dirt came over it, covered up the battery cover, and the instrument panel so bad that you couldnÂ’t read the Power Down or Power Up decals. When we got back to the Lunar Module, I brushed off not only the camera, but the batteries and the instrument panel as well. And that made the problem of dusting me and Charlie off even worse too. We had a lot of dust on top of our OPSs, had dust all over the place, dust on the helmet, dust around the neck-ring, what a mess.

Duke: Raining dust.

Young: Yeah. The message is donÂ’t trip over the fender. It didnÂ’t bother us any apparently, but it sure was dusty.

Duke: No trouble with any of the transfer. We loaded all the bags up, and jettisoned the pallet. The ETB came up easy, John passed them into me and IÂ’d pass them on up and put them on the ISS and then John got in and closed the hatch and turned off the waters as planned and repressed.

EVA 2 Post Activities. Cabin Repress was nominal, PLSS Refurbish was nominal, Rock Samples Stowage and Weighing was just as advertised in the checklist. We did dry out the PGA every night.

Young: IÂ’m not sure it dried very much.

Duke: No, it never did get real dry. The next morning weÂ’d get up and itÂ’d still be damp, but it wasnÂ’t uncomfortable.

Young: On those evening meals we were eating everything that we could get our hands on. Sure got hungry after a day out there in the toolies.

10.3 Third EVA

Young: EVA 3 Prep. There again it was straightforward. I think it was due to training. Man, IÂ’m glad we trained as much as we did on that. Although that was the worst training we did the whole - I mean as far as keeping behind the power curve from start to finish - thatÂ’s just a miserable way to spend 3 or hours. But it sure paid off. PGA Verification, straightforward; Cabin Depress straightforward; Egress, straightforward. By that time I think we were maybe 20 minutes ahead when we got out. ThatÂ’s probably why they let us do the EVA longer. It was here when we got the UV camera pointings that we had to move the UV camera and the first time that we moved it to a place that they told us to move it to. Then there was no way to get the - get between the UV camera and the strut to work it so I had to move it back a little. We took some more time to change the azimuth and here again it was still on a slope that went down and it was impossible to get the thing aimed without really kicking it down in the earth on two legs and leaving one leg almost out of the ground. And every time we changed the azimuth - it changed the whole alignment of it. And they wanted to move the battery into the shade at this point, which we did. Okay, and I guess I had so much trouble with that every time that you had to do all the ETB stuff every time.

Duke: Yes. It was in my checklist, right?

Young: And thatÂ’s a good reason for having those operations in both checklists. Because if one guy is operating the equipment, then the other guyÂ’s operating straightforward, like the ETB which everybodyÂ’s done. Then if anything goes wrong with the equipment, then the guy who normally does it can slough off and you still havenÂ’t lost anything. Load-up was the same thing. Between Station 8 and 9, we lost the first SCB that fell off my back and lodged between the rear fender and the frame. It was full of samples but we didnÂ’t lose any. We didnÂ’t lose it.

Duke: Yes, that was really lucky.

Young: WeÂ’d have lost half a bag of rocks if that thing hadnÂ’t have hung in there. Pure luck.

Duke: Really got to improve those SOB tie downs. Not only because you could lose the thing and lose the samples, but the way it is right now, itÂ’s just hard to do. And itÂ’s not secure what youÂ’re doing.

Young: I like CharlieÂ’s idea of a shopping bag where you just have something with a strap on the side. Matter of fact we used the regular SOBs, if you just had a strap on the side where you could stick your hand in and if the bag was just a little more rigid so it would stand up instead of lay down all the time. You could carry that on the surface, set it down because of bending the suit and do things like independent sampling.

Duke: Okay, I think the travel to 11 was just spectacular scenery the whole way and you always felt like you were right down on top of North Bay. In fact, I thought we were there when we crossed that first big rock that ended up to be Station 13. Looked like it was - you could see it way up on the slope.

Young: I thought we were up on the rim of it when we crossed that first ridge short of Station 13. I said, boy, and thereÂ’s a lot of boulders up there. As we got up to this ridge, there was a whole lot of boulders as we climbed up this ridge and I says, man, weÂ’re getting near the ridge, and they said youÂ’re 500 meters away. Sure enough we were. We climbed up over the ridge and it almost looked like a second ring around North Ray.

Duke: No, Ken and I talked about this the other day. There was a ridge line north of Palmetto that came out south of North Ray and came back around again and where we crossed back over here, we started climbing again.

Young: Well, it was a ray though, because it was just like Schooner Crater out at the Nevada test site. We were riding along in this regolith and North Bay blocks would be sticking out, I mean big blocks two or three meters across, the top of them would be sticking out of the regolith as we got over that ridge. And itÂ’s just very much like Schooner Crater where we had the big blocks that were all mantled by that powdery regolith.

Duke: I think those might have been blocks from Palmetto, John, those might have been because those were really mantled. Really had fillet that looked like they were almost subdued.

Young: But they could have been blocks from North Ray.

Duke: Except most North Ray blocks were not that well filleted. YOUNG And they werenÂ’t as rounded either, if I think about it.

Duke: Another unique part about that drive up there was that once we got up past Palmetto, there was a total absence of sharp craters. There were one-meter to two-meter sized craters.

Young: There was a real absence of craters and the blocks were gone.

Duke: Gone!

Young: Yes, just practically gone much less than five percent.

Duke: It was really like driving out in west Texas across some sand dunes.

Young: There were some pretty big down slopes going out there.

Duke: Yes, out to north of Palmetto.

Young: Yes, and as we climbed up the rim to North Ray it was really a steep slope going right up to the edge of the rim. Of course, the old Rover didnÂ’t notice it - just went right up it. But, when we turned around and cane back down it we really noticed it. ThatÂ’s where we achieved V_max and we achieved another V_max when we were on the other side of Palmetto. I felt a lot better about achieving V_max down our tracks than I did trying to set any going the other way. We did 17 kilometers coming down that hill for a short period of time. It doesnÂ’t turn. It just goes in a straight line no matter what you do to it. And I donÂ’t recommend that at all. All I do is slow down after that. YouÂ’re just on a piece of mass thatÂ’s going along.

Duke: We combined Station 11 and 12 and that gave us about an hour up there. We did the 500 millimeter of the interior, of what we could see of the interior of North Ray which was about, I would imagine, halfway down the wall, maybe two-thirds. You could not see the bottom. I wasnÂ’t going to get close enough to see in because there was no way you could have gotten out of there if you had fallen in. Well, anyway, I took the 500s there and I was looking back at Stone, I took those. I took some of Smokey, of the ray going up the flank. The Near Polarimetric Photo they threw out because we had a gnomon failure. And that happened on EVA 2. We didnÂ’t mention that.

Young: Charlie pulled it out of the bag and the leg stayed in the bag. I never thought the gnomon would fail. I really was surprised. I figured what would happen was that it would bounce out of the bag and weÂ’d never see it again.

Duke: But we did do the Far Polarimetric Photo and it worked. I havenÂ’t seen the pictures but at least the filter worked like it was supposed to and I took all the right settings. And I let them know whether I was going from right to left or left to right. And I took three partial pans up near where we stopped the Rover. I moved North around the rim about 50 to 60 meters and took another series.

Young: I guess we could have probably gotten down to the rim edge. It was about a 10 or 15 degree slope down there and I really wasnÂ’t too anxious to go down there and fall in that crater. So we stayed about 50 meters from the edge of that crater.

Duke: I bet you there were some big blocks in the bottom of that crater, though. Sure would have liked to have seen that.

Young: Yeah, I would have liked to have seen it.

Duke: Did you ever go directly over it so you could see in the bottom, Ken?

Mattingly: Yes, there were some big blocks down there.

Young: And that is a steep wall crater too, because IÂ’m almost sure that that thing that looks like talus over on one side has a linear orientation in it. What IÂ’m saying is the ...

Duke: The blocks are disjointed but theyÂ’re layed in there.

Young: Yeah, they are layed in there like outcrops.

Mattingly: ThatÂ’s typical throughout. That crater inside didnÂ’t look any different than 10 million other craters around the Moon. They all have that same characteristic. And I donÂ’t know if that is a sub-layer thatÂ’s being exposed or not, but my impression was that itÂ’s not but thatÂ’s the way the thing sort of slumps.

Young: I donÂ’t see how it could slump uniformly like that.

Mattingly: Well, I tried to trace some of those I could see well with binoculars and you couldnÂ’t trace a continuous layer. The things bounced around, but it does at first glance - it looks like theyÂ’ve fallen in strata.

Young: These particular ones sure did. Maybe they are a layer that got layed. up there that slumped back down together.

Mattingly: ItÂ’s still strange that they would end up in some kind of horizontal line.

Young: Yes, itÂ’s weird.

Mattingly: But, looking down in North Ray I had absolutely no sensation of any strata.

Young: Me either, me either - except for that line of blocks.

Mattingly: South Ray had material in it that looked to me like it was in place, but North Ray just didnÂ’t.

Duke: We couldnÂ’t see inside South Ray except the upper part of the southwest wall.

Mattingly: But, I really didnÂ’t spend a lot of time looking in those craters. Because I thought pan camera pictures from right straight overhead have got to do better than I could do.

Duke: Yeah, thatÂ’s great. I canÂ’t wait to see those.

Duke: Well, we saw the house-sized block. There was one there. YOUNG CouldnÂ’t keep Charlie away from it.

Duke: And it was a biggy, but it was just a two-rock breccia. And some of the clasts were meter size. It was predominately black.

Young: I bet there was more than two.

Duke: Well, all I could see was two, let me put it that way.

Young: I never really would have looked to see how many.

Duke: John saw a shadow cone on one section of it that apparently had broken off.

Young: We got a picture of it.

Duke: And we got a north-east-west split and got a sample which I donÂ’t whether it is going to show anything.

Young: ItÂ’s a good east-west split, Charlie.

Duke: I took a flight line stereo of the thing.

Young: The trouble is that Charlie couldnÂ’t back away enough to get the whole thing in there. Did you pan up and down by any chance.

Duke: I donÂ’t think so. I donÂ’t really remember.

Young: I donÂ’t remember you doing that either, but if you backed away too far he would have been over the edge of the down slope.

Duke: But we got some sample off it in place and got some off the contact in the breccia, both clasts.

Young: That was a big rock. There were some big white rocks up north of there we got.

Duke: There was a huge white rock in the swale between Smokey and North Ray that we didnÂ’t get to.

Young: We didnÂ’t go to, right?

Duke: This was the densest boulder field of the whole EVA.

Young: Right between Smokey and North Ray.

Duke: North Ray, but we never got over there. We started going up there and it was just a glistening white rock out there that was very angular - looked like maybe it was 5 meters across. And it looked like one great big piece of crystalline rock to me from a distance. But it could have been a breccia. But it sure was angular and it was a biggie. But, we never did get over there to sample it, which was tragic. Okay, we did all the regular sampling. We had some problem up there. JohnÂ’s bags fell off and bags fell off. We ended up wearing the bags on our little finger. We were carrying the bags like that and pulling them off. We probably wasted a few minutes independent sampling. Then we got organized and we started sampling together and that was a good move. And the regolith was very, very thin up there. You couldnÂ’t even rake the rake through it. It bent the tines on the rake. It was only about a centimeter or so thick and under that it was hard.

Mattingly: This is at North Ray?

Duke: Yes, on the rim. Yes, what we ended up doing was IÂ’d hold the rake and heÂ’d kick some stuff in to it and we ended up kicking enough so we could shake out a few samples.

Young: We practiced that on the ground. I didnÂ’t imagine we'd ever have to do that.

Duke: I didnÂ’t either but we sure did - because it bent the tines just like it does in the training exercises down at the Cape.

Young: It was at Station 13 we achieved V_max there coming over that rim - 17 kilometers and I sure donÂ’t recommend that. It was near the bottom of the slope and we had a straight path with no blocks. I just took my hand off the brake; I didnÂ’t add anything. But it must have been an awfully steep slope.

Duke: I think on the whole way I was underestimating slopes and overestimating size of rocks and percentages for some reason.

Young: Yes, I think I was too.

Duke: I think that when they look at all the traverse pictures that we got on the way theyÂ’ll see where I said was covered by 60 percent of the surface, itÂ’ll probably end up being something like 10 percent. It was covered with cobble size.

13 was really a big boulder. We stopped at the big boulder - when I say big, I mean four or five meters across. It was a breccia. On the east side of it, it had some very strange holes in it that looked like drill holes to me. They were perfectly circular. They werenÂ’t vesicles and it just looked like they were bored out of the thing and in only one side of the rock. In fact it looked like it was drilled out for blasting.

Young: Yes, thatÂ’s what it looked like to me too.

Duke: We got some pictures of that.

Mattingly: Did you run anything inside it and see how deep it was?

Duke: No. I started to do that with the pencil but the Rover was sitting over there and I just didnÂ’t. But we did get a permanently shadowed sample out from under there. And that was a true, permanently shadowed sample. Y0U1G Yes, Charlie got way back up under there and no doubt in yr mind that itÂ’s a permanently shadowed sample. In the meantime, I took the LPM reading.

Duke: Yeah, John was tangled up in the LPM cables. Scratch, l4, 15, i6, 17. Ten prime was out northwest of the ALSEP, 20 meters, or so. And we got some nice crystalline samples there, plus it looked like it was ejected from South Ray material but there were some nice angular rocks we got.

Young: Yes. We had the big rock bag on and I scooped up a big rock at North Ray. And I got another big one, maybe two big ones at 10 prime. I think theyÂ’re fully documented.

Duke: The crystal rocks that we found throughout, the whitish ones had a sugary texture to them. And the crystals were big enough to see crystals in them, meaning a couple of millimeters high, some of them. There was just a light - various shades of gray, I guess. There were no salt and pepper texture to the rocks.

Young: You know on the bottom of that rock we turned over, I swear that looked like quartz - that white crystal on the bottom of that rock. I hate to say it but it sure looked like it.

Duke: I think so.

Young: The same old vitreous luster mashed quartz crystal - either that or white glass, one of the two. You could see right through it.

Mattingly: Did you get a piece of it?

Young: Oh, yeah.

Duke: The rocks really looked a lot like earth rocks.

Young: They really did, I agree with you Charlie.

Duke: They didnÂ’t look like the typical lunar volcanic rocks.

Young: In most every case where you wanted to see a fresh surface you had to bang it to get it.

Duke: In 10 prime we did all of what we did there, and we got a core as I recall.

Young: Yeah.

Duke: It went pretty smoothly and we were looking for some basaltic rocks. We never found them, but we did find some crystalline rocks. We scratched the Grand Prix, the LRV offload was nominal, and John drove it on out to the parking site.

Duke: I was surprised. I hit one rock that was really a hard crystalline rock and it broke.

Young: You hit some pretty hard there. Charlie, you hit them a couple of times there. When you didnÂ’t hit on a fracture surface, it was pretty tough.

Duke: It was tough. Yeah.

Slayton: Were there lot of fragments flying around.

Duke: No, they just pulverized, really.

Young: Really surprised at the size of the chips we got every time. I thought we were going to get little bitty chips and we ended up with pretty good sized rocks.

Duke: Some nice fresh surfaces, too. Sugary looking. I found a crystalline rock for John, for the LPM. It was about baseball size and just fit right into the bag and I was really lucky to do it. It was definitely crystalline rock, it was not a breccia. Had that sugary texture to it. The LPM stuff we sent back, there sure were some funny readings on those things. I donÂ’t know what PalmerÂ’s going to do with that.

Young: I donÂ’t know either, thatÂ’s strange stuff. Almost every place that we had put the LPM was where there was either a crater or an old subdued crater and maybe if those old craters were in primaries, maybe just the fact that youÂ’ve got a real primary whomping in there would change the magnetic field. I donÂ’t know. There was hardly any place that we didnÂ’t put the LPM, that wasnÂ’t a crater of some kind. Like at the big rock where I put it up, I put it right into the edge of the crater.

Young: ThereÂ’s just no way out. An old subdued crater. ItÂ’ll hardly show up.

Duke: The LRV Setup was no problem. Went as advertised. The SWC, just like in training. I took that dadgum thing off and tried to let it slowly roll up and it slowly rolled up and was about 2 feet long. So, I pulled it back down again and when I pulled it out again, it partially ripped on the left hand side. And then I tried to let it roll up. I had a little bit better luck with it this time it came up about oh, a foot long. It was about three inches or so in diameter, so I just crushed it with n hands and stuck it in the bag and it went right in the bag. We threw it in the ETB for transfer up. Then I didnÂ’t have anything else to do then until John got the cosmic rays done and weÂ’ll let him talk about that.

Young: Like Charlie said, we didnÂ’t have any trouble with the LRV setup. We opened it all up, pulled all the circuit breakers except for the Aux circuit breaker and Aux switch which we pushed in, but, we still had to dust it real good, and set up the LCRU with a blanket folded over it, and all that went real well. There was no problem associated with doing that. The Far UV camera cassette was the next to last thing we did. When we went to get the Cosmic Ray Experiment back, I picked it up and brought it around to the MESA and pulled the last ring. The strap that was hanging down from the bottom of it, the nylon strap, was very much like the one in training. I grabbed hold of it and gave a little pull and it didnÂ’t move. I gave a harder pull and it didnÂ’t move, gave a real hard pull and tore out the bottom of the nylon strap. Then Charlie came over and helped me. We got the pliers out and put the pliers on the bottom of it and gave a real hard pull with that. And then it managed to start to come out. As soon as we broke it loose it was free and it came on out.

Duke: I was holding the top part, the frame, and I was pulling and. John was pulling with the pliers on the bottom of it.

Young: If we hadnÂ’t had those pliers we probably would still be there. That doesnÂ’t mean we wouldnÂ’t have brought back the whole thing. We could have brought back the whole thing but it would have been an additional thing weÂ’d had to think about stowing

Duke: But that cover was hot. That was the only thing on the whole EVAs that I touched and held onto that I could feel through those gloves. By the time John got through pulling that thing out of there I could feel the heat on my fingers.

Young: LetÂ’s just finish this up. Cosmic Ray Experiment stowage was no problem. Retrieving the Far UV camera cassette was a piece of cake. And ingress, did you see any problems with that?

Duke: No.

Young: We had a lot of bags. The last bag we got up was the big rock bag and let me just say one thing about that. Once, we got it inside, we had too many rocks in the big rock-bag and we had to reshuffle some of them by hand. We had to make the big rock bag weight less than 45 pounds.

Duke: It weighed about 50 something and we took two rocks out of it and got it down to 40.

Young: The main rock we had in there was that big Muehlberger rock and one other one.

Duke: Watermelon size.

Young: EVA 3 Post Activities. The repress was normal. Again we tracked in a lot of dirt with us. Weighing and stowage was normal. I donÂ’t remember any problems we had with stowing any of the boxes.

Duke: We left our helmets on and broke out the scales. We started tying down, just like weÂ’re supposed to before the jettison time. We weighed them and then we had to wait about 10 minutes until they decided whether we could keep all the rocks.

Young: One thing we did. that was necessary, we had to get the weight of the ISA down to 45 pounds. I had to reach in and pull out the Muley rock to get a rock out from underneath it. I think we took two rocks out of that bag, and put 'em in a half-full SCB to make the weight more balanced. I ended up touching a rock with my bare hands. I really didnÂ’t plan to do so. There must be some stray hydrocarbon on those rocks that I touched. They were big rocks.

Young: We did a suit loop check, depressurized the cabin, and dumped out the bag. I opened a hatch as soon as I could pry it loose, and a lot of the dirt went over the side with it - but certainly, by no means all of the dirt. The power up was nominal, wasnÂ’t it Charlie?

Duke: We didnÂ’t do the P22, but otherwise, we just breezed right on through the launch prep.

Young: One thing that I noticed, the Earth was in the window, and so was the navigation star. Which star was it?

Mattingly: Altair.

Duke: Achernar.

Young: Achernar?

Duke: Yes.

Young: ThatÂ’s really a B. And itÂ’s right in there. Where was Altair?

Duke: It was the Achernar.

Young: Achernar.

Duke: Detent one.

Young: It was in detent one, and the torquing angles were small after the gravity align. It was really a good alignment, both of them. I was really surprised to be able to see the star. We didnÂ’t even turn the lights out in the cockpit. We put the window shades up but we left the lights on in the cockpit and had no trouble seeing the star. And the platform torquing angles were small.

Duke: The night before when I went to bed, I looked to see how the alignment was going to be and to see if I could see any stars. 1 and 3 were gray, 2 was a pretty good detent, except the radar antenna was there at the time but I could see something over the top. There was something white in both 4 and 6 I donÂ’t know if that was reflected Sun or not. I think it was reflected Sun off the steerable antenna in detent 4. I donÂ’t know what was in the other one but I thought those two detents were useless.

Young: Two and four?

Duke: Four and six.

Young: We had a couple data stars in those detents.

Duke: ThatÂ’s right.

Young: So the next man that picks stars better think about those kind of things.

Duke: Launch Preparation. We didnÂ’t have any problems. No, we didnÂ’t. Everything went well.

Young: Even though we were completely powered down, as soon as we received the state vector, had the clock, and mission timer started, we were right back in business. We checked the did the computer check, and, we were already to go.

Duke: We were way ahead. At liftoff minus 35, we held for 20 minutes. The next thing was at liftoff minus 15, we had about 20 minutes with nothing to do.

Young: ThatÂ’s right, we sat there with helmets and gloves on. We started a little bit early on the helmets and gloves because of a wrist ring problem.

Young: IÂ’m glad we did, because we had a problem. Every time we put the wrist rings on we didnÂ’t know if we were going to get them on, and then once we got them on we didnÂ’t know if we could get them off again. We knew we were going to get 'em off, but it sure wasnÂ’t the normal click click, push pull. I think we need some protection against dirt getting into those wrist locks.

Mattingly: If youÂ’d wrap a piece of tape around -

Young: I thought about wrapping tape around it but would the tape stick?

Mattingly: That gray tape would do it.

Young: IÂ’m not sure it would stick in a vacuum very long. I think you need something more than tokenism on that cover.

The systems were powered up, and the launch preparation was nominal. IÂ’ll tell you what happened to me on the launch prep. About three minutes prior to launch as I was looking out the window and the Sun was bright overhead my left eye started crying. I had the window down all the way. I normally kept the window up. For launch you want the window down. I couldnÂ’t see out of my left eye. It became worse and worse, and it was as bad as it got just prior to launch. It was really bad. I closed my left eye and it was tearing badly. I think it was just due to the brightness.

Duke: So it made you like snow-blind.

Young: Yes. I just couldnÂ’t believe it. It was almost like I had something in sty eye. IÂ’m sittinÂ’ there and I canÂ’t see out of my left eye and weÂ’re going to launch in two minutes.

Duke: I couldnÂ’t believe it either. I looked over at him and he looked like both eyes were closed.

Young: Well, there was nothing I could do out it. I sure didnÂ’t plan to abort the launch for that. I had my right eye, and I was going to fly it using one eye if I had to. I was going to fly on instruments anyway. You couldnÂ’t fly on it out the window on the ground track without really being in good shape. We had at least five guidance systems and four different control modes going for us before I had to use my left eye, so I felt pretty confident. I think itÂ’s something you need to think about. Looking out that bright window all the time with a helmet on leaves your eyeballs with no protection.

Mattingly: Could you get any relief by holding your hand up?

Young: Yes, I put my hand over my eye and that relieved it. Charlie couldnÂ’t figure out what I was doing.

Duke: I thought you had something in your eye.

Speaker: Sunglasses?

Young: You don’t want that under the pressure helmet, because you have to look inside the cockpit and you can’t get ‘em off. That surface was some bright, and we were looking upslope. We were looking up the rim of this crater. I don’t know why it didn’t bother Charlie over on his side, but it sure was - sure got to me.