Camelot to Station 2

Traverse to Geology Station 3

 

Geology Station 2

Corrected Transcript and Commentary Copyright © 1995 by Eric M. Jones.
All rights reserved.
Scan credits in the Image Library.
Video credits in the Video Library.
Audio clips by Dave Shaffer.
Last revised 4 August 2017.

MP3 Audio Clip starting at 142:43:20 ( 21 min 43 sec )

142:43:37 Cernan: Okay. Let me get (my seatbelt) undone here. Amp hours are 98 (and) 98. Batteries are 90 (degrees) and 112, and the motors (are): forward left is off-scale low and right is 340. Forward (means "left") rear is off-scale low, and right is 240. I expect we've got a bad meter (on the forward right).

[Gene has misread the motor temps and corrects himself at 144:29:16.]

142:44:16 Cernan: Yes, sir. Zero-point-one, 9.1, 7.6. We are right at Station 2. (Pause)

[For some reason, Gene is mis-stating the bearing to the LM as 'zero-point-one'. It is really 071. His net speed for the whole trip out from the SEP transmitter has been 6.4 kph - 7.9 kilometers of map distance in 73 minutes. Measured along their meandering, 9.1-kilometer path, their average speed has been 7.5 kph including several stops.]

142:44:31 Schmitt: My goodness gracious.

142:44:36 Parker: ...(charging ahead with rapid-fire instructions) we'd like for you guys to look at in the (housekeeping) overhead. In addition to them. We'd like the TV lens to be dusted, in addition to the regular dusting. That'll take the lens brush, remember.

142:44:41 Schmitt: (To Gene) Can you try to tighten that (camera handle)?

142:44:42 Parker: You might check the low-gain antenna elevation to make sure it's at 45 degrees. We think you commented on that, and I think you're right now looking at tightening Jack's camera handle.

142:44:57 Schmitt: (To Bob) I'll work on that. Gene, you go ahead with the other...

142:45:00 Cernan: Okay. Yeah, we are at 45 degrees (low-gain antenna elevation), Bob. Let me check it. I'll lose the comm on you a second. I've got to turn it towards me. (Pause; brief static) Mark it at 045.

142:45:21 Parker: And, 17. Jack, we'd like you to check the SEP for us. I suspect we'll have to turn it off and open the mirrors and dust them.

[The SEP receiver/recorder on the back of the Rover has been overheating.]

142:45:48 Cernan: You('ve) got (the) high-gain.

[TV on.]

142:45:50 Parker: Roger. Thank you. We have TV. (Pause) Geno, we...

RealVideo Clip by Mick Hyde (11 min 20 sec)

142:46:06 Cernan: Oh, Manischewitz!

142:46:06 Parker: ...did not get a good bearing from you guys. We might also check the LMP's camera.

142:46:11 Cernan: Okay. I'll give it to you again.

[Gene is working at the front and right side of the Rover, occasionally coming into view.]

[Jack's initial thought is that Bob is asking about the camera handle, and then realizes that he is asking about a frame count.]

142:46:20 Schmitt: Okay, LMP...

142:46:28 Cernan: Okay; 071 is the bearing (to the SEP transmitter).

142:46:33 Parker: Okay. Copy that.

142:46:35 Schmitt: 142 (frames) on the LMP's camera. The (SEP) temperature is 105.

142:46:47 Parker: Roger. Let's turn off the (SEP) power and the recorder, open the blankets, and dust it.

142:46:57 Schmitt: Power's off; blankets are open; and, Gene, you'll have to dust it.

142:47:05 Cernan: I'll get it. I've got a lot of dusting to do here, Jack.

142:47:10 Schmitt: Okay. (Looking at his checklist) Let's see what we've got to do.

142:47:14 Cernan: We've got a lot of housekeeping to do right now.

142:47:14 Parker: And, Jack, I presume when I told you, you turned off the receiver, didn't you? Not just the DSEA?

[This Data Storage Electronics Assembly is a removable unit which will be brought back to Earth. As it turns out, good data has been obtained during the drive out from the LM and more will be collected on the return to the LM from Station 4.]

142:47:23 Parker: That's what I thought. Thank you.

142:47:25 Schmitt: Oh, my scoop! My scoop just came off (the extension handle)! That's interesting. I'd better check the rake. Vibrated loose, I guess. (Long Pause)

[Jack is at the gate. Re-attaching the scoop to the extension handle is a relatively simple matter of pushing the spring-loaded collar toward the scoop and rotating the collar to engage the latching pins.]

[Cernan - "The only time we did any traverse training pressurized was at the Cape. The rest of our geology traverse training was done in street clothes. But we needed to get in the suit and actually work with core tubes and the other equipment, actually get down into the nuts-and-bolts of it and handle the drill, handle the core tubes, assemble the Rover, and work with the things that were going to give you difficulty in the pressurized suit. Some things, like working the locking mechanism on the extension handle weren't very difficult; but things like aligning core tube threads were much harder to do than they were in shirtsleeves. That kind of training was very, very valuable. So, in the later stages, we'd do pressurized training down at the Cape maybe once or twice a week for the last couple or three months. It wasn't something I'd particularly look forward to, because it was hard, hard work."]

[The scoop and rake are each attached to an extension handle seated in a bracket on the gate. Even though the locking mechanism had released, as long as the back of the Rover didn't bounce too much, the tools wouldn't have jumped off the mating post on the end of each handle.]

[Schmitt - "The failure of the lock was probably caused by the dust which, I'm sure, had worked it's way into the sockets by this time. By the third EVA, a lot of the sockets just weren't working: you either couldn't get them loose or couldn't get them connected because of the dust. Dust is going to be the environmental problem for future missions, both inside and outside habitats. And, unfortunately, although there's a lot of lip service paid to it, I don't detect a great deal of imaginative thinking about how you deal with the dust."]

[Fendell pans the TV to look at the replacement fender; the TV lens is dirt spattered.]

142:48:00 Schmitt: Stand by. (Long Pause)

[Fendell pans to Gene who is dusting the left-side batteries. Jack is at the gate, re-attaching the scoop to the extension handle.]

Video Clip ( 3 min 41 sec 1.0 Mb RealVideo clip or 38 Mb MPEG )

142:48:34 Schmitt: Okay, magazine India. My goodness, we'll never get started.

[Jack, a bit frustrated about all of the housekeeping chores, goes to Gene's seat and sticks the scoop in the ground while he gets a film magazine. Gene has moved out of the field-of-view.]

[Cernan - "As I recall, when we went down into the trough it was like going down a hillside. It wasn't a deep trough, but it was enough to give you a close, local horizon that hid the rest of the valley."]

142:49:05 Parker: Okay. And John (Young) suggests that we might just check it momentarily while you're here to make sure it's still holding on good and tight. Both the clamps and the tape. 142:49:15 Cernan: Yeah, that's on my list. (Pause) If it stayed on through that ride it may never come off! Okay. (Pause) Have you got a lens brush in there, Jack?

142:49:37 Schmitt: Yup.

[Jack finishes loading the film magazine in his camera. Although we don't see him remove the old magazine on this film change, he has probably put it on Gene's seat. When he picks up the new magazine, he removes the dark slide and puts that on the seat, and then inserts the new magazine before putting the dark slide into the old magazine and stowing it under Gene's seat. Readers may want to note that the replacement fender will fail mechanically during the drive from Station 9 back to the LM at the end of EVA-3.]

142:49:42 Schmitt: Yeah.

142:49:45 Cernan: Do you want the covers open?

142:49:47 Schmitt: They should be open and dusted. (Pause)

142:49:54 Cernan: Okay. The SEP is open. It's about 100 degrees.

[Jack gets a lens brush from beneath Gene's seat. Note that he uses the scoop as a support as he leans in inward to reach the brush.]

[Jack drops the lens brush and retrieves it. We get a brief glimpse of the brush handle.]

142:50:07 Schmitt: Here's your lens brush; if you need it.

[Jack reaches across the seats. It's a very small brush.]

[Gene is asking Jack to see if his 70-mm camera lens is clean.]

[Jack leans across the seat so that Gene can clean his camera lens.]

142:50:34 Parker: And, Jack, we're suggesting that you're getting a little warm. Maybe Intermediate (cooling) might help.

142:50:40 Schmitt: Bob, I feel the same way; but I want to get this camera fixed. (Pause) I mean (get) the film changed.

142:50:46 Parker: Okay.

[Before taking Magazine 135/G off his camera, Jack advances the film and gets four frames, AS17-135- 20676, to 20679, showing the LRV seats and floor.]

[Schmitt - "During the pre-mission training, we spent a lot of time outside and pressurized, training for the EVAs down at the Cape in a simulated traverse area."]

[Training photo S72-48892 (scan by Ed Hengeveld) shows Jack and Gene on the 1-g trainer in the midst of the EVA training area at the Cape, complete with basalt boulders.]

[Schmitt - "You couldn't work ten hours like we did on the Moon, but we would work for like four hours. And we wore ourselves out before somebody had the bright idea - and I hope it was me, but I don't remember - of hooking the liquid-cooled garment up to some ice water. I'm surprised we didn't kill somebody from heat stroke. It was just too much. We shouldn't have been doing it. We didn't have any significant cooling for a long time - just an inadequate liquid-air cooling system in the lightweight PLSSs - and, then, during training for some mission, probably 15, we decided to have somebody walk behind the pressurized astronaut with a backpack full of ice water, and a hose going into the suit attached to the liquid cooled garment. And, of course, that made all the difference in the world. I think that was my suggestion, but I can't be sure; so much of that stuff happened synergistically. But I was worried and I know I made a big point to a lot of people for a long time that you were going to hurt somebody, that they were just getting too hot, including me."]

[Jack relates a variant of this story in his EVA-1 commentary at 118:39:52. The first half of this EVA-2 review was actually done some months before the EVA-1 review.]

[Cernan - "I don't think we had the ice-water cooling for the Apollo 14 EVA training; for me, that showed up on Apollo 17. Although Apollo 14 was a January launch and ours was a December launch, we trained all year long. It got hot down there at the Cape, and you worked hard. I never felt we were going to kill anybody; but the ice water did help. It made a big difference. It allowed you to work more efficiently and kept you from getting as hot and tired and irritable, and you got more out of training than you would have otherwise."]

[Gene swings the TV around so that he can dust the lens.]

[This is a reference to the time before self-service gasoline/petrol station became common in the 1970s. When you pulled into a full-service station, an attendant came out and, after finding out how much gas you wanted - either a dollar amount of 'fill her up', would usually ask if you wanted the level of the car's motor oil checked. See a Wikipedia article on Filling Stations.]

[Gene raises his visor; he has a light growth of beard and a relaxed expression.]

[Gene finishes and moves away; Fendell starts a clockwise TV pan.]

[The light mantle is the result of a massive landslide that was triggered about 100 million years ago by the impact of ejecta from the Tycho impact. Tycho ejecta also dug many of the craters in the Central Cluster. See a 1976 discussion by Arvidson et al.]

142:52:06 Parker: Okay. Copy that, Jack. Looks fantastic up there.

[AS17-138-21033 is a good view to the northwest into Nansen from the lower of the two Station 2 boulders.]

[Fendell finds Gene at his seat; Jack is in the distance, behind the Rover to the southwest with the lower slopes of the South Massif in the background. Gene gets the gnomon from its sheath behind his seat and goes to the gate.]

142:52:49 Parker: Roger. Copy the mark.

[Fendell pans away counter-clockwise.]

[Schmitt - "When I was estimating the percentage of fragments, (the 10 to 15 percent figure) was related only to fragments large enough that they seemed to jump out of the matrix, that were clearly of a larger size than the matrix components. My guess is that the minimum was of the order of a few millimeters in size and that the estimate was really biased toward the larger fragments of centimeter size and more."]

142:53:43 Parker: Copy that.

[Schmitt - "When the small impacting particles that form the zap pits hit, if there's crystalline rock - particularly plagioclase - at the impact point, then the halos look white. And in this case I'm saying that, because the halos don't look white, the rocks are not coarsely crystalline on the scale of the zap pit."]

142:54:00 Cernan: Jack, that rock has almost got to have come down (from the outcrops high on the mountain), don't you think?

142:54:04 Schmitt: Oh, no question about it. I'll bet you it's the same as the blue-gray rocks we see up higher. Here's some more blue-gray ones over here.

142:54:11 Cernan: Let's start taking...Oh, yeah. Look at the size of some of these light fragments in here.

142:54:18 Schmitt: Yeah, but it still...It looks like they're dominantly matrix breccias. There are light-colored fragments, and they (the fragments) may be crystalline.

[Fendell finishes his counter-clockwise pan at the Nansen/South Massif contact and reverses direction.]

142:54:35 Schmitt: They are. They're very light colored; they look like the shattered anorthosites. They have white halos (around zap pits)...I think that's what those fragments are.

142:54:48 Cernan: Jack, let's get a piece of this one right here (Boulder 1).

142:54:51 Schmitt: Okay.

142:54:52 Cernan: It's the biggest one here.

[Schmitt - "Boulder 1 was very weakly indurated but had a lot of layers in it; it was pretty easy to sample because it wasn't as tough a breccia as some of the others were. Boulder 2 was up on the slope and was about head high. We got a series of four or five samples, I think, and, as we'll hear described, we got a soil sample from a permanently shadowed place underneath an overhang. Boulder 3 was the one in which we found the crystalline dunite, which turned out to be very old. After the mission, there was a scientific consortium, called the Consortium Indomitable, headed by John Wood of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard, which published a suite of papers about Boulder 1."]

Video Clip ( 2 min 32 sec 0.7 Mb RealVideo or 25 Mb MPEG )

142:55:00 Parker: Okay. Copying that. (Pause)

[Jack's down-Sun "before" is AS17-138- 21029 and Gene's cross-Sun stereopair is AS17-137- 20900 and 20901.]

[Schmitt - "The gnomon gave you the local vertical, a 40 centimeter scale, a shadow which gave you azimuth, and also had a gray scale and three international color references for photometric calibration. In principle, the shadow, if visible in both pictures of a stereopair, could be used to control azimuth for topographic analysis. The vertical scale of known length provided other control parameters. I am not sure anybody ever did such an analysis, given the way resources dried up after the Apollo program. I don't think anybody's ever used those photographs or the data contained in them for analysis. But we gathered it."]

["The gnomon is the residuum of an original concept Gene Shoemaker had for gathering data with a stereo camera mounted on something called a Geologic Staff; the camera would have been taking pictures continuously, with the orientation of each frame recorded automatically. (A mock-up can be seen in Apollo 14 training photo S70-46157.) In fact, it started out as a video camera. Unfortunately, NASA never saw fit to fund that. They finally, belatedly, funded development of a stereo camera, but they were forced to do it through a small business contract. And, instead of it going to a company like Kodak which had already built a stereo camera for use on the Moon - namely the Gold Camera (which is another story) for Apollo 11 - this one wound up going to a small company that couldn't handle it. They spent a lot of money and never produced a camera. It was just too much for them. Kodak did the Gold Camera, which I think in some ways was a more difficult job, in six months."]

["The Gold Camera took close-up stereo pictures of the lunar soil and that was NASA's homage to Tommy Gold and his gadfly irritation of the system. (Flown only on Apollo 11,12, and 14.) He cost us an awful lot of time and money; although I have to admit those were nice little pictures. I don't know if anybody's ever used them for anything; they are close-up documentation of the pristine lunar soil or, at least, as pristine as you can get close to the LM. But you see, Tommy was the one who, fairly late in the game, kept coming back and saying that the astronauts were going to sink out of sight in a thick layer of lunar dust. And even after Surveyor landed, this kept coming up because, from his radio telescope investigations he was seeing the upper few microns of the surface and he was seeing this "faerie castle" structure. It really is there - in the very top surface - but there was absolutely no scientific, geologic, or logical reason to think that, on centimeter scales and larger, the surface wasn't well tamped by the meteors. And when Surveyor landed, it didn't sink down at all; and that should have been conclusive."]

["Harold Urey was another guy who was way outside his field and said many things that seemed to many people to be off-the-wall; but Harold's intellect was such that, in the final analysis, his suggestions were not the kind you could ignore. And in a lot of cases he was right on things that geologists were wrong on, mainly because geologists got too immersed in the details. Harold was able to look at the Moon in a cosmological sense and at least some of his conclusions - not all, but at least some - were quite good. He even wanted to go. In the late sixties, at a meeting in La Jolla, he volunteered to me that he would take a one-way trip. He said 'NASA is doing it all wrong. They ought to just let me go one-way, and then you wouldn't have to pay all the money to get me back.'"]

[Readers interested in a further discussion of Urey's and Gold's lunar participation should consult Don E. Wilhelms' excellent 1993 book "To a Rocky Moon".]

142:55:11 Schmitt: Okay; well, you can work that block over...

142:55:12 Cernan: Yeah.

142:55:14 Schmitt: We can get several examples. We ought to sample across that layering...that foliation.

142:55:18 Cernan: One comment. When you look down into the bottom of Nansen, it looks - like, I guess, would sound obvious - that some of the debris that has rolled off of the South Massif covers up the original material there that covers the north wall of Nansen. There is a distinct difference. You've got that very wrinkled texture in the north slopes of Nansen, and you've got the South Massif debris in the south slopes of Nansen. And the debris, of course, overlays the north slope. And all the rock fragments, all the boulders that have come down, are all on the south side of the slope of Nansen.

142:56:05 Parker: Okay; got that.

[Schmitt - "While Gene was doing this description, I was probably looking closely at the boulder, very engrossed. And, while it's true that Gene is repeating essentially what I had said earlier, it shows both how engrossed he'd been in his housekeeping tasks and how good a feel he had for observation. He picked up all of the same things that I'd picked up earlier and, as he always did when he put his mind to it, did an excellent job."]

["It was brought to my attention on, I think, an Apollo 12 training trip to Hawaii, that stratigraphy was something of interest to the other astronauts. I think Dale Jackson was leading the exercise. And after we'd done our exercise and were all gathered around, Dale asked each of the other astronauts to give their impression of what had happened geologically, of what they had seen. And then, after they had each had a chance to do that, he asked me to summarize it and I fell back on a technique I always used in order to organize my thoughts, and that was to talk in terms of oldest unit to youngest. I just put them in sequence and talked about how the relationships between units developed as I went through in my mind oldest to youngest. And Dick Gordon - although it could have been Al Bean - asked me how I kept my thoughts organized. And that emphasized in my mind how easy it was for them to understand the concept of superposition; it's the most fundamental concept in geology, the first ever documented by natural scientists, namely by Steno (alternatively Nicolais Steno and Niels Stensen), a Dane who lived in the 1600's. Anyway, it was something that I kept putting into the training program to make sure they all realized how easy it was to organize your thoughts in terms of what's on top of what. Gene picked it up and did it well. He could have done a lot more than he actually did. Some of his more rambling descriptions - for instance, when he did his hurried horizon description from the LM - are a little bit harder to follow but, in this particular case, you can see that Gene has his thoughts pretty well organized. "]

142:56:25 Cernan: Oh, look at that blue! Look at the white fragments in there. (Pause)

142:56:36 Schmitt: Let me come and help you there.

142:56:37 Cernan: Man, there's some boulder rolling rocks here, Jack. (Laughs)

[Fendell pans past the back of the Rover. Gene and Jack are hidden by the gate.]

[Schmitt - "This was what we called a target of opportunity. We had been looking for situations where you could get a sample from underneath a boulder overhang where it has been protected for some time from the solar wind; and, if I remember correctly, that was to give us a better handle on when the boulder rolled into that position and began to shelter the soil underneath it. The solar wind age on the fillets on the boulder should be distinct from the age of the soil underneath the overhang. I don't know who thought that up, but I tell you, the synergism in the planning for these things was so great that there's just no way that any one individual can ever take credit for anything."]

142:57:19 Parker: Copy that.

[Fendell looks at the rear of the Rover. Nobody is in sight.]

142:57:22 Schmitt: 514.

142:57:26 Parker: Okay; Jack...

142:57:27 Cernan: (Garbled) this other one (garbled).

142:57:27 Parker: ...if you could tear yourself away in the middle of that sometime to give us an EMU readout, we'd appreciate it. We haven't gotten that from you yet on the EVA.

142:57:34 Schmitt: Okay. I'm...Stand by. Gene's got a rock to go (in a sample bag). (To Gene) That's from up higher?

142:57:42 Cernan: That's a little higher. See that chop up there?

[Fendell pans counter-clockwise.]

[Schmitt - "I'm sure that the sample bag system evolved with time but, by the time we flew 15, we had a standard Teflon bag with the little metal strip in it; and they were all pre-numbered. We didn't try to take them out in sequence. They were on dispensers in sequence but, as I recall, we didn't worry about getting dispenser 1, dispenser 2, dispenser 3. You didn't have to; once you had the number of a sample, they could find it. In thinking more about it, Neil (Armstrong) went out and just tried to get as many different kinds of rocks as he could and put them in a bag; I bet you we didn't have individual bags on 11. On Apollo 12, though, I suspect that we did (true), because we knew they were going to move around more."]

["The metal strip was sealed into the upper hem of the bag in such a way that, when you took a bag off the holder it would spring open a little bit. But I think we had to squeeze in on the ends so that it would open even more. Then, when you had the sample in the bag, you folded the metal strip to provide a mechanical seal."]

142:58:07 Cernan: Yeah.

142:58:15 Schmitt: (To Gene) Okay. You're (SCB cover's) open. I'll leave you open for a minute.

142:58:18 Cernan: Well, okay. Just so they don't fall out. Am I in?

[Gene is asking if Jack has finished putting the samples in his SCB.]

142:58:22 Cernan: Okay. (Pause)

142:58:28 Schmitt: Okay, go ahead.

142:58:31 Cernan: Let me try from back here.

142:58:34 Schmitt: Of course, that's a north/south overhang.

[Schmitt - "A north/south overhang won't provide continuous sun shading and what we really wanted was an east/west overhang."]

142:58:39 Schmitt: Yeah, yeah.

142:58:40 Cernan: I don't know if I can get a piece back here or not.

142:58:43 Schmitt: How about right where you...Yeah.

142:58:45 Cernan: Right here? I can get that.

142:58:47 Schmitt: Yeah, that's good. Oh, beautiful!

[Jack is pleased that Gene knocked the sample off so easily.]

142:58:50 Cernan: Well, I already...It didn't move. It just tilted it.

142:58:53 Schmitt: This it?

142:58:54 Cernan: Yeah, that's it right there. (Pause) Let me set my working tool (the hammer) down here.

142:59:05 Schmitt: Got a bag?

142:59:06 Cernan: Coming right up.

[Jack has picked up the rock fragment with his scoop and is waiting for Gene to get a sample bag open.]

142:59:20 Parker: Understand, 0.5 meters up.

[This is sample 72255, a 2.5x9x10.5 cm, 461 gm light grey breccia. The original location on Boulder 1 is indicated in Figure 2 from the Apollo 17 Sample Catalog, Part 1 ( 29 Mb PDF ).]

[Fendell reaches the limit of his counter-clockwise pan and reverses direction. Here, Jack is saying that, once a rock gets covered with dust, it is impossible to say much about it.]

142:59:33 Parker: Okay. Copy that now.

[Schmitt - "What we never worked out with Bob was that, when he heard something, he had to tell us that he heard it. And that invariably interrupted the next thought. It should have been only when they didn't understand that they would interrupt us, but we never got Bob to do that. And the total amount of time lost was significant."]

[Jack's comment should, however, be tempered by the observation that there were times when either he or Gene, realizing that they hadn't heard from Bob in a while or hadn't gotten confirmation of a transmission, would ask if they were being read. Bob would often try to judge when Jack had finish a thought before making an acknowledgment. Given the 2.5 second round-trip communications delay, that was sometimes difficult. In listening to the other missions, CapComs like Bruce McCandless (11), Ed Gibson (14), and Joe Allen (15) tended to interrupt less often than Bob did; however, on the other side of the coin, none of the other crews had as much to say. Obviously, this was occasionally a point of tension between Bob and Schmitt and was partly a product of their personalities.]

[Cernan - "It was never a problem. It was an open conversation between the three of us, plus Bob had fourteen people over his shoulder telling him what to do. He had to listen to them, listen to us, and get instructions up to us in between our comments to him. Frankly, I don't think any time was lost. Everything that was said needed to be said. And, let me tell you, when you're flying in an airplane or working on the Moon and it gets quiet on the airways for five minutes, I'll say 'Hey, Whisky Bravo, are you still with me?' If I don't hear other airplanes or the center or anybody else - which doesn't happen all that often except sometimes late at night - I'll do that. From my point of view, the occasional interruptions were a small price to pay for knowing that we'd been heard."]

142:59:40 Cernan: Yeah. I might either get that or this other piece up here. Without busting my butt.

142:59:44 Schmitt: Well, don't take any chances.

142:59:45 Cernan: Yeah, I'm not going to. How about this one? Here's a whole big piece.

[Fendell has been looking for Gene and Jack, and people in Houston are wondering where they've gone.]

142:59:56 Cernan: Can you get it? I can't reach it without my camera hitting (the boulder). That's a football-size fragment.

143:00:02 Schmitt: (To Bob) Okay, this next sample...(To Gene) Can you get a bag out, and we'll try to put it around it. Around the end. (Pause) Bob, it's highly variable. This is a light-matrix breccia; whereas the other three fragments were dark-matrix or dark-fragment breccias. The big rock (fragment that Jack is discussing now) is a light-matrix breccia with dark fragments, and it's the one that has the (dark) halos around the light fragments. And that's in 495, barely. It's not even in it. It's just...495 is wrapped around it.

143:00:50 Cernan: It's not going to stay.

143:00:51 Schmitt: It's not going to stay, is it?

143:00:55 Cernan: No. Well...It's a football-size fragmental rock.

143:01:00 Schmitt: Why don't you see if you can stuff it in there...with the bag down.

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143:01:06 Cernan: Yeah, we'll be able to identify 495 when we get back. Okay, it'll stay.

143:01:11 Parker: Okay; we copy that, Gene. And...

143:01:11 Schmitt: Is the bag on it now?

143:01:12 Cernan: Well, yeah,...It's on it, facing down.

143:01:13 Schmitt: Great.

143:01:14 Parker: ...do you guys see any tracks coming down to these boulders? Do have any feeling that you can place (the source of) these that way?

143:01:23 Schmitt: Bob, unfortunately, no. The main tracks are out into Nansen, and I don't think we can get over there.

143:01:29 Parker: Okay; that's those biggies that we see on the maps, huh?

143:01:34 Schmitt: Yeah. Coming up, I was looking; and there are no obvious tracks coming down here.

143:01:41 Cernan: Watch your shadow, Jack.

[Gene is reminding Jack to keep his shadow out of critical parts of the photograph, which is probably Gene's "after", AS17-137-20902]

143:01:48 Cernan: Yeah, I reset it.

[Jack is southwest of the Rover but not yet above the break in slope and can now be seen through a gap in the top of the gate.]

143:01:51 Parker: Okay. We copy that.

143:01:52 Schmitt: Do you need to take a vertical pan?

143:01:53 Cernan: Yeah, I've gotten it all. I'm getting it all.

143:01:55 Schmitt: You getting the flight line? I'll get a flight line this way. (Pause) Post-sample flight line.

[Gene's color flightline stereo and vertical pan is made up of AS17-137-20903 to 20909. They make up a portrait of the sunlit face of boulder 1. Jack is taking a black&white flightline stereo comprised of AS17-138-21030 to 21035.]

[Schmitt - "A flightline stereo was a series of stereo photographs rather than just a pair. For a pair, you would just take one step left or right between the frames but here, you took a series of steps in a line, taking a picture after each step. It was a series of stereopairs which could be convergent stereo if the camera was always pointed at the same point, or parallel stereo if you didn't turn the camera. For analytical purposes, convergent stereo was better, but we didn't worry too much about that and usually took the pictures roughly parallel."]

143:02:14 Parker: Copy, 42.

[Jack puts the sample in Gene's SCB.]

143:02:20 Schmitt: Yes.

143:02:21 Cernan: Okay. (Pause)

[Schmitt - "We would take a "locator" back to something like the Rover, just so that there was something in the picture that could be used to work back to where the sample had been taken. We'd just turn around and take a picture of the Rover or of the horizon. Originally it had to do with the LM being in the picture as a "locator" because, from the geometry of the Lunar Module and knowing how it had landed, you could work back along a ray to where you were and, as well, get a distance based on the size of the Lunar Module. I'm sure that in this case the locator was back to the Rover."]

[Actually, Jack has forgotten to take a "locator" at Boulder 1, but will take one at Boulder 2.]

143:02:35 Cernan: You going to get that sample under there?

143:02:36 Schmitt: Yeah, we got to get the soil.

143:02:39 Cernan: There may be an overhang. And look at that, that rock is fragmented; let's see, it's southeast/northwest. There's a split.

[That is, the boulder is split into two major fragments, with the dividing plane oriented SE/NW.]

143:02:53 Cernan: Yeah, I'll get that.

143:02:54 Schmitt: This fillet?

143:02:55 Cernan: You got it?

143:02:57 Parker: And, 17...

143:02:58 Schmitt: (To Houston) This is a fillet from underneath the rock.

143:03:02 Parker: Roger. And an update on the rake samples when you get around to it. We'd like to get one up on the massif slope as much as you can, if you can get over to it. And then the second one down near the Rover.

143:03:13 Cernan: Okay.

[Fendell gets a good view of the rake.]

[Schmitt - "In order for me to pour the soil in the bag, I wanted to get him downhill."]

143:03:43 Cernan: And it's bag 496.

143:03:45 Schmitt: Now let me get one out away from the overhang a little bit.

143:03:50 Cernan: Okay.

143:03:52 Parker: Okay. You think that's permanent shadow?

143:03:57 Schmitt: No.

143:03:58 Cernan: No. It's facing east.

143:04:00 Parker: Okay.

[Schmitt - "We were looking for an east-west overhang, preferably on the north side of the rock, where the sunlight and the solar wind might not have reached."]

[The best examples of boulders casting permanent shadows were found at Station 6 on this flight and Shadow Rock at Station 13 on Apollo 16. As it turned out, the solar wind saturates newly exposed soil in a matter of only decades and then retains the solar wind gases during the gardening process. Very little difference was found in the relative abundances of solar wind constituents between surface samples and samples from the bottom of the deep cores or permanent shadows.]

MP3 Audio Clip ( 12 min 24 sec )

143:04:19 Parker: Copy that.

Video Clip ( 3 min 53 sec 1.0 Mb RealVideo or 39 Mb MPEG )

143:04:22 Schmitt: Now, let me get a skim sample, Geno.

143:04:25 Cernan: Okay. (Pause)

[Schmitt - "A skim sample was the thinnest section of the surface of the regolith that I could get, intended to be a sample of the most modern solar wind effects. And then, you try to get stuff from underneath that."]

143:04:36 Schmitt: I can piece them into my flight line stereo.

143:04:39 Cernan: Okay. They were in both of the "before" pictures on those rocks.

143:04:44 Schmitt: Okay; about a centimeter-deep skim. Careful

143:04:51 Cernan: You're in a hole. You better come out.

143:04:54 Schmitt: Yeah. (Pause) Boy, that's hard on the hand (manipulating the scoop) even in one-sixth g.

[They are visible through the gap in the gate again.]

143:05:06 Schmitt: And that was...(Pause) Okay.

143:05:11 Cernan: And I didn't park that Rover in a very good spot for them to watch what's going on, I guess; but that was the heading.

143:05:16 Schmitt: Oh, shoot. They're missing all of it.

143:05:18 Cernan: We didn't work in the right spot; that's all.

143:05:21 Parker: Every now and then we get a peek at you guys. But only every now and then.

143:05:27 Schmitt: Sorry, Bob.

143:05:31 Cernan: Oh, wait a minute.

143:05:36 Schmitt: You know, that's the way it happens.

143:05:38 Parker: Skim sample bag number, please.

143:05:39 Cernan: Okay. It's back on.

[Something has come loose, possibly Gene's pack of sample bags. Fendell pans away to look at some nearby boulders and small craters at maximum zoom.]

143:05:55 Parker: No. That's okay. I suspect it's 498.

143:05:55 Cernan: (Not having heard Bob yet) I'm almost positive it was 498.

143:05:58 Parker: Okay. We'll put that down.

143:06:00 Cernan: Yeah, I did, too. (Pause)

143:06:09 Schmitt: Okay, Bob, looking at the blocks directly down-Sun, the gray-matrix breccias seem to be fragments, or schlerin anyway (elongated fragments with vague boundaries, usually elongated by either compression or shearing), within the white-matrix breccias.

143:06:32 Parker: Okay. I copy that.

[Schmitt - "I think one reason you hear the word 'Okay' so much is that we were using it as a trigger for the VOX, the voice-activated communications circuit, so that you don't cut out your first real word. I don't think it's something we talked about; it just developed."]

[A quick check of the transcripts from the other Apollo missions indicates that all of the astronauts frequently used "Okay" and most often at that start of utterances.]

[These are AS17-138- 21036 and 21037.]

143:06:51 Schmitt: Rog. We're going to do that. We're going after a lighter-colored block, now. (To Gene) Are you going up there?

143:06:56 Cernan: Yeah.

[Gene is about to climb the slope to Boulder 2.]

[Fendell returns to them.]

143:07:17 Schmitt: Well, I don't...(Contemplative mumble) I'm not sure they're going to gain anything by coming up to the top (higher than the Rover). Okay.

[Jack starts for the Rover; Gene, visible in the gap, starts climbing the slope to the southeast.]

143:07:27 Parker: Standby.

143:07:28 Schmitt: You're still on the talus. (Pause) You guys...Oh, well. (He decides not to waste time arguing) The rims of the small craters in the talus are softer than the normal terrain. My foot goes in maybe 10 centimeters where normally it only goes in a centimeter.

[Jack reaches the Rover.]

143:07:56 Schmitt: (Testy) That's right!!

[Jack mounts the scoop on the gate, takes the rake.]

143:08:06 Schmitt: Because I'm late sampling, that's why. But I'll do it anyway.

Video Clip ( 3 min 21 sec 0.9 Mb RealVideo or 33 Mb MPEG )

143:08:09 Parker: Roger.

[Gene has placed the gnomon near Boulder 2 but then goes downhill to take a couple of pictures of Earth, which he could see above the rock as he approached it. He leans backward to take the shots. These are AS17-137- 20910 and 20911.]

143:08:30 Parker: Okay. Copy that, Jack. Press on.

[Jack leaves the Rover but forgets the scoop and comes back to get it. Gene moves the gnomon.]

143:09:05 Schmitt: Hey, look, Gene, on these rake samples, there is just no point in carrying a rake all the way up here...

143:09:11 Parker: Negative, Jack, as long as you're above the break...

143:09:12 Schmitt: ...because all we needed was a break in the slope.

143:09:16 Parker: As long as you're above the break in the slope; that's right.

143:09:17 Schmitt: Well, that's all right. It's being done; but let's watch those kind of calls please.

143:09:24 Cernan: (Acting the peacemaker, smoothing ruffled feathers) They can't appreciate the toughness of going up this slope, though. We can; we've got to tell them that.

143:09:29 Schmitt: Well, we did.

143:09:30 Parker: Yeah, that's what we were saying. Don't go above just at the base of the break in the slope, Jack. Don't climb all the way up there with it.

143:09:36 Schmitt: Oh, relax!

[Schmitt - "I made a suggestion right at the beginning about where to do the rake sample; and they were coming back as if they never heard that. It seemed at the time that Bob wasn't screening requests from the Backroom and that he should have said, 'Hey, he's already told you that.' That's why I was getting annoyed."]

[Cernan - "There were just so many things going on in that Backroom and in the Control Center; Jack's been back there and he knows it. There were a lot of things that Bob had to filter out and there was a lot of time pressure. Coordination was the key and I think it worked pretty well. It was our job to let them know what we could do and couldn't do. And, while there were times when they may have wanted something we couldn't get for them, I don't ever remember anyone pushing once we advised against what they were asking us to do or we said it couldn't be done. I mean, it was our flight; they were there to help us and the mission simulations we did with the Backroom involved were an important ingredient in our training."]

[Jack switches to a two-footed hop as he gets on the steeper slope below the boulder. After a few hops straight uphill, he starts moving cross slope.]

143:09:56 Cernan: Yeah. Well, it looks like the same texture, but it's got that flaky fracture pattern all over it. I'm going to get a (flightline) stereo while I'm at it.

143:10:08 Schmitt: Yeah. (Pause)

[Jack plants the scoop in the ground. Gene is taking a series of cross-Sun pictures showing the entire south face of the boulder. These are AS17-137-20912 to 20923. David Harland has assembled frames 912 to 914.]

[Jack leans on the boulder for a close examination. Gene double waves to reach his cooling control.]

143:10:54 Cernan: Are those halos or fragments?

143:10:55 Schmitt: No, they're halos. Well, there are fragments, I think, also. But, right now, (I'd say) it's fairly crystalline, but it is heterogeneous. Matter of fact (laughs) there's a big fragment of a porphyry caught up in this thing, I think.

[A porphyry is a rock with two distinct crystal sizes.]

[Schmitt - "We had learned from the rocks brought back on the earlier missions that the zaps were a very good indicator of what was underneath because, not only did they shatter the crystalline fragments, but they knocked off the patina. There was a light, brownish patina on all of these rocks that we had found out was a very thin, partial covering of brownish glass, probably due to the splattering from these zap pits. The more recent zaps knocked the patina off around the little pit and you could see better."]

["I spent a good deal of time between missions studying the rocks. I did the first real hand-specimen study of the Apollo 11 basaltic rocks and then I worked with other samples off and on, mostly just to get familiar with the rocks. I had quite a few sessions, just going through the rocks, taking notes, and fixing in my mind what other people had seen. And then I got some of the other crews over to the Receiving Lab to look at rocks."]

143:11:12 Schmitt: I haven't done a thing.

143:11:13 Cernan: Okay. Well, I want to start taking some (samples).

[Fendell pans away counter-clockwise.]

143:11:19 Cernan: That's what I want. That's where I'm going right now.

143:11:21 Schmitt: And there's a chunk there we can get. That's a big fragment within this crystalline rock,...

143:11:24 Cernan: Take a picture of that...

143:11:26 Schmitt: ...an inclusion.

143:11:27 Cernan: Take a picture of that and then your locator, I'll get it.

[Jack's down-Sun "before" is AS17-138- 21038 and his "locator" to the Rover is 21039 (scan by Kipp Teague). In the "locator", notice the disturbed soil around Boulder 1. Note also, Jack's footprints farther to the right. This was his path back from the Rover with the rake. Wessex Cleft is in the far distance above the Rover.]

143:11:32 Schmitt: Go ahead (and get a sample). I've got it (that is, the locator). (Pause) Got it?

143:11:52 Cernan: Yeah, I've got it.

143:11:55 Schmitt: Beautiful. Looks like a porphyry!

143:11:57 Cernan: Boy, it does look like a crystalline rock.

143:11:58 Schmitt: Looks like an andesite porphyry is what it looks like.

[Schmitt - "This is a good example of using the appearance of terrestrial examples to help in a description. 'Andesite' implies a specific composition but, when you're in the field you're not so much saying that you think it's that composition as you're saying what it resembles based on your experience. I think that, somewhere else, we've talked about the trouble some members of the scientific community gave Buzz Aldrin when he said something looked like mica. There's absolutely nothing wrong in field geology of saying what something looks like; you'll find out what it really is later."]

["One of the reasons that these things looked like porphyries is that they were crushed. They were crystalline rocks - rocks that had crystallized out of a magma body - that had been crushed by impacts, and the largest uncrushed fragments stood out against the pulverized matrix. So you get a coarse crystal in a fine-grained matrix and that's why I used the word 'porphyry'."]

143:12:09 Schmitt: (To Houston) It's a relatively angular inclusion. It's about a half a meter in size, and it's a square cross section. Well, it's irregular; but generally square cross section. It's in bag 516, and it looks like it's a high feldspar rock. It may be an anorthositic gabbro, but it does look like a porphyry.

[Schmitt - "I've just noticed that, at the start of this speech, my words were slurred, almost as if I were very dry or had too many drinks. I may have just been getting tired, because I'd just climbed the slope."]

143:13:09 Schmitt: Yeah.

143:13:10 Cernan: And then in the big rock, you've got massive things - like this big fragment here - that's 5 inches across.

143:13:16 Schmitt: Well, that may be a spall point, Gene; that's a lighter color, in general, because of a zap or something.

143:13:23 Cernan: Let me get some more samples off it.

143:13:25 Schmitt: Yeah, we need to get some of the host rock here.

143:13:27 Cernan: Okay. We'll get a piece here.

143:13:29 Schmitt: Okay now, you're still sampling the one we just got. So we'll get another one (of the same inclusion). Okay. The same kind...The contact of that (inclusion with the host) rock looks like it might be finer grained, but it's about the same...in 517. That's the inclusion side of the contact. (Pause) Keep going after the other one, Gene, I'll get this in your bag.

[Houston is discussing a ten-minute station extension. Fendell is looking into Nansen.]

143:14:08 Parker: Yeah, we saw it, Geno. Quite a sight; quite a goodie.

143:14:13 Cernan: Okay. Let me see if I can't get this one here. There it is.

143:14:19 Schmitt: Okay. The host rock for the inclusion - which appears to be also crystalline but may be a re-crystallized rock of some kind...

143:14:28 Cernan: Can't see it too well.

143:14:29 Schmitt: ... (of) metamorphic...(It) also looks like it's (got a) high plagioclase (content)...high feldspar, anyway. That's in bag 518. And that was a fairly loose but in-place fragment along a fracture zone.

Video Clip ( 3 min 21 sec 0.8 Mb RealVideo or 33 Mb MPEG )

143:14:52 Parker: Okay,...

143:14:53 Cernan: Will you hold this a minute? I'm going to try to get the rest of it up there.

143:14:55 Parker: Okay, 17. And for your thinking in the next few minutes, you might also factor in the question the Backroom raises about taking 10 minutes out Station 4 and adding it into this station, given the wealth of interest that seems to be occurring here. You might think about that. You haven't been to Station 4, so it's a little hard to judge. But if you think 10 minutes can be very profitably spent, you might as well do that.

143:15:21 Schmitt: Okay, Bob, we'll think about it. This is a medium-green.

143:15:24 Cernan: I can't get any more of that.

143:15:24 Schmitt: ...anorthositic gabbro, and it looks like it has some pastel-green olivine crystals in it. (To Gene) Did you get it?

143:15:33 Parker: We copy that.

[Fendell is still looking into Nansen at high magnification.]

143:15:36 Schmitt: Okay, and that small chip of that is in 519. It's the same host rock, much like the previous sample.

143:15:46 Cernan: There's a good sample for you.

143:15:47 Schmitt: Okay. (To Bob) And another chunk of the host...Oops, be careful.

143:15:53 Cernan: Yep.

143:15:54 Schmitt: It's still there.

143:15:56 Cernan: Yeah, I've got it.

143:15:58 Schmitt: I need to get rid of this (sample)...

143:16:01 Cernan: Okay?

[Fendell pans clockwise.]

143:16:14 Cernan: We ought to get a soil sample, though, up here, so...

143:16:16 Schmitt: We'll get the rake sample right over here on this slope.

143:16:18 Cernan: (Having just chipped off a rock fragment) Where did that thing go, Jack?

143:16:20 Schmitt: Right here.

143:16:22 Parker: Okay. Was that last sample in 518, as well?

143:16:25 Cernan: (To Jack) There it is. That's it right there.

143:16:31 Schmitt: (Responding to Bob) No. We haven't put it in yet.

143:16:35 Parker: Okay.

143:16:37 Cernan: Bob, that will go in 499.

143:16:38 Parker: Copy that. (Pause)

[Fendell examines the North Massif.]

MP3 Audio Clip ( 11 min 38 sec )

143:17:07 Cernan: Here, Jack...

143:17:08 Parker: Copy that.

143:17:09 Cernan: Might get the soil from around that thing.

143:17:10 Schmitt: Bob, both rocks look like they might be in the anorthositic class...

143:17:15 Cernan: Your bag is still open part way, too.

143:17:16 Schmitt: ...of rocks. It's just that one has the appearance of being a finer grain matrix. Looks like a porphyry in the boulder.

143:17:28 Parker: Okay. And a reminder, as you photograph it, to remember that the photograph in the southwest quadrant there will be the best ones. Around the corner on two sides there will be the best ones to show the structure through the whole rock.

143:17:40 Schmitt: Yes, sir. (Thinking about what Bob has just said) Oh, the southwest?

143:17:44 Cernan: South and west.

143:17:45 Parker: Roger.

143:17:47 Schmitt: South and west. Yeah.

143:17:48 Parker: Roger.

143:17:49 Cernan: No, the west's in shade.

143:17:50 Schmitt: No, no. You mean the...

143:17:51 Parker: Southwest...

143:17:52 Schmitt: South and east.

143:17:53 Parker: Roger. The southwest face...Or it faces not quite south.

[Fendell is looking at the sky.]

Video Clip ( 2 min 32 sec 0.6 Mb RealVideo or 25 Mb MPEG )

143:18:10 Schmitt: Okay. I'll do that.

143:18:11 Cernan: Way out under there. I've got to stereo this one. I've already got it.

143:18:19 Schmitt: Well, I'm getting it from this way, and they like that. Did we kick any dirt in under there?

[Soil kicked under the overhang will contaminate any shadowed samples. One of the aims of collecting these samples is to look at the influence of solar wind exposure on the relative abundances of various elements and, of course, an admixture of unshadowed soil would, of course, muddle the analysis.]

[Cernan - "In the suit, shuffling around, you're not the most agile person in the world and, if you're not careful, you'll kick dust onto a pristine surface that you want to sample. When you're working, you're not necessarily watching how you're walking. You're not necessarily clumsy, but it's like waddling around in some big, old, fat galoshes and you just naturally disturb a lot of the surface in the area where you're working."]

143:18:49 Schmitt: I've got that (picture), Gene.

143:18:51 Cernan: Okay.

[Gene has just taken AS17-137- 20924.]

[Fendell reaches the rear of the Rover. Jack has taken AS17-138- 21040, 21041, and 21042.]

143:19:02 Cernan: Did you get under there?

143:19:04 Schmitt: I think so.

143:19:02 Parker: ...from up there before you leave the high uphill area there. There's no point in climbing up there twice. Remember?

143:19:08 Cernan: Yes, sir, Bob. How much time we got here now?

143:19:10 Parker: Stand by. (Pause)

143:19:19 Schmitt: (To Gene) Okay. You got your bag?

143:19:20 Parker: Okay. We got 12 or 13 minutes left at this station; unless you take that extra 10 minutes that we were offering you.

143:19:27 Cernan: Let's take it, Bob.

143:19:30 Schmitt: We got to get the rake.

143:19:31 Cernan: Let's take it; we'll need it.

[Fendell is looking at Earth over the Massif.]

143:19:34 Cernan: Okay.

143:19:36 Schmitt: I don't know whether I can or not.

143:19:38 Cernan: Do you know how far under you're getting, by any chance?

143:19:41 Schmitt: Yeah. (To Houston) I got under an east-west overhang about 20 centimeters...Way back. Quite a ways back; it goes even farther, but that's about as far as I can reach back and sample

143:19:54 Cernan: That's enough, Jack let me...

143:19:56 Parker: Okay. I copy that...

143:19:58 Schmitt: That's in bag 500.

[Post-flight analysis of this 106-gram soil sample (72320) indicates that it wasn't completely shielded from the Sun and is comparable to fully exposed soil collected nearby.]

143:20:10 Cernan: Isn't that pretty over...Can you see the Massif, too?

143:20:14 Parker: Now we're coming down to look at the Massif. Had a beautiful picture of the Pacific there? Ed (Fendell) finally found it. Now we see the Massif.

[Schmitt - "Ed had been in charge of the Communications Console for as long as I could remember."]

[Cernan - "The Earth looked big; and, like the Moon looks down here, it probably wasn't as big as it looked. Yet, because the Earth's beauty was so predominant, there was also a feeling that it was the most precious possession a man could stow in his memory. There was the beauty of the colors of the oceans and the clouds: multiple shades of blue, from the azure of the Caribbean to the deep dark blues of the Pacific; the shades of white of the clouds and the snow; and the black of space around it. There you were, standing on the surface of the Moon in full sunlight, looking at the Earth, a quarter million miles away, surrounded by the blackest black. Not darkness, but the blackest black a human being can conceive in his mind. I think the perception that the Earth looks bigger than it really is probably comes from the majesty of its colors and from the fact that you are there on the Moon, looking back at it. It's an overpowering figure of life in the sky."]

["Even on the TV, it is a spectacular view. It's a half Earth and you can see clouds and the blues of the oceans. With your naked eye, you could make out continents. You can imagine working on the slope of the Massif on top of the Scarp and, every once in a while you have to look over your shoulder to look at what's looking at you and think about where you are and what you're doing. Sometimes, it still hardly seems like it was real. It sometimes almost seems like we were too nonchalant, worrying about fractures and rocks and rake samples and all that when the Earth was over our shoulders."]

[At maximum zoom, three Earths would fit across the vertical width of the TV screen and about five horizontally. From the lunar surface, Earth's angular diameter is 1.9 degrees and, before Fendell went to maximum zoom, it appeared as though Earth was about ten diameters or 20 degrees above the apparent summit.]

143:20:27 Cernan: And, Bob, I took an "after" picture (AS17-137-20925) of where Jack just got that soil sample under the rock from; and I'm on (frame) 60.

143:20:36 Parker: Copy that.

143:20:37 Schmitt: Are you through with the gnomon?

143:20:38 Cernan: Yeah.

Video Clip ( 3 min 15 sec 0.8 Mb RealVideo or 34 Mb MPEG )

143:20:39 Schmitt: I'll set it up for the rake.

143:20:41 Cernan: Okay. I'll go up there and get a pan, Jack.

143:20:43 Schmitt: Okay. You get that pan...

143:20:44 Parker: I didn't get that soil bag number, Jack.

143:20:46 Schmitt: We've been here...(Answering Bob) 500.

143:20:51 Parker: Copy that. (Long Pause)

[Fendell returns to Jack, who is positioning the gnomon at the rake site.]

143:21:06 Cernan: You betcha. And do I know it.

143:21:09 Schmitt: (To Gene) Hey...Bob, how long have we been at this station?

[Jack plants the scoop.]

143:21:21 Schmitt: Is that right?

143:21:23 Cernan: All ready? Jack...

143:21:26 Parker: And we're going to give you that extra 10 minutes out of Station 4.

143:21:29 Cernan: I can't believe we've been here...

143:21:33 Parker: That leaves you about 20 minutes; then you'll have to be moving.

[As indicated on CDR-11 ( 26k ), Station 2 was scheduled to be a 50 minute stop. They been here for about 38 minutes so far. They had planned to arrive at Station 2 at 2:02 and leave at at 2:52 minutes. They arrived at 2:08 and, with the extension, they should leave at 3:08. They will actually leave at about 3:12.]

[Jack is taking down-Sun photos of the rake site. The rake head is sitting on the ground with the handle sticking up at about a forty-five degree angle. The rake head is quite heavy, about 1.50 kilograms compared with 0.82 kilos for the extension handle. The "before" pictures of the rake site are AS17-138-21043 to 21046.]

143:22:04 Cernan: I'm standing in the crater so I can get level.

143:22:07 Parker: Yeah, we see that.

[Gene's pan photos are AS17-137- 20926 to 20956. He is standing about 10 meters upslope from Boulder 2. Frame 20942 is a good shot into Nansen.

David Harland has assembled a high-resolution portion of the pan (2.9 Mb) showing Nansen, Boulder 2, and the Rover, using scans from original film provided by NASA Johnson and processed by Kipp Teague. The frames are AS17-137- 20938 to 20955.

143:22:31 Schmitt: Bob, my down-Sun pictures on the rake were taken at f/8. I'm sorry.

143:22:38 Parker: Okay, copy that. We'll take it into account.

[A nominal down-Sun picture of a rake sample would be taken at f/11, at a distance of eleven feet, and at 1/250th of a second exposure.]

[Jack gets the sample by dragging the rake uphill. He stands facing the mountain, slightly uphill of the gnomon, and begins each stroke with the rake at his side and then pulls it forward. It looks like a very awkward motion. At the end of the stroke, he hops forward and drags the rake a little farther.]

[Schmitt - "Any tool that you have to drag along the ground is going to be difficult to use and, by this time, anything you had to do with your hands wasn't easy."]

143:23:22 Schmitt: I got to get it first.

[After finishing the pan, Gene turns and takes three photos of the Earth over the South Massif. These are AS17-137- 20957, 20958, and 20959. He then takes two more pictures of Earth over Boulder 2. These are AS17-137- 20960 and 20961.]

143:23:40 Parker: Okay. I expect it's all downhill from here.

143:23:45 Cernan: Well, no, sir. Not exactly;...

[A major consideration in traverse planning was the possibility of a Rover failure that would force the crew to walk back to the LM. For return under an hour, it was assumed that the crew could achieve an average speed of 3.6 km/hr and average metabolic rate of 1560 BTU/hr. For longer returns, the assumed averages were 2.7 km/hr and 1290 BTU/hr. The assumed metabolic rates included a 20 percent safety margin and were used determine how quickly the remaining supplies of oxygen and cooling feedwater would last.]

[A figure from a 22 August 1972, pre-flight planning document by P.E. Reynolds of Bell Labs ( 50k ) shows the planned elapsed times and distances to the LM at various phases of EVA-2. The oxygen and feedwater limits are represented by the diagonal lines on the righthand side. Note, also, the distance limit of 7.6 km imposed as a contingency against failure of one of the PLSSs. In that case, it is assumed that the two astronauts would use the BSLSS to share feedwater and that the astronaut with the failed PLSS would operated his OPS in low-flow mode. The assumed return speed is 7.3 km/hr and allowances are made for about 15 minutes to return to the Rover and get the BSLSS hooked up and, once back at the LM, another 13 minutes for emergency ingress.]

[I have added the actual Apollo 17 data, shown by dashed lines. Note that the return distances from the various stops are greater than used in planning because Gene landed east of his target point to avoid Geophone Rock.]

143:23:47 Parker: Can you guys see the LM, or are you too far down to see the LM?

143:23:48 Cernan: ...that's why I said we could meet our walkback constraints. (Responding to Bob) Oh, no. The LM is over about three rises in the Scarp before we can even see it.

143:23:58 Parker: Okay, I thought that might have happened.

143:24:00 Cernan: I'm not even at a level of the last hill we came over.

143:24:07 Parker: Okay.

143:24:08 Cernan: I don't know if you've looked up that way (with the TV).

143:24:10 Parker: Roger. We had a feeling for that. I was just checking. (Pause)

143:24:20 Cernan: We can meet them (the walkback constraints), but I wouldn't stretch them.

143:24:22 Parker: Okay. (Pause)

[Schmitt - "By this time in Apollo, the walkback constraints had been well established. My main effort was to make sure they weren't too constraining. Left to their own devices, some of the planners would have been much more conservative than was necessary."]

143:24:39 Parker: Okay. I copy that. (Pause)

[Schmitt - "The people examining samples had concluded that there was a significantly larger variety in the walnut-size range than there were in the major rocks that were scattered around. Apparently, rocks thrown into a site from distant places were concentrated in the walnut-size range."]

[After finishing each rake swath, Jack has been moving sidehill to stand on the just-raked ground and begin the next swath. He had started the series with a long swath at 143:22:42, took nine more short ones requiring only a step or two each. Now, he finishes the series with an extra long swath taking by running uphill, dragging the rake behind him. Fendell is at maximum zoom. In his suit, Jack stands roughly six feet tall and he fills about half of the TV's six-degree-high frame. This suggests that he is about 120 feet from the Rover. The distance given in the Preliminary Science Report is 45 meters or 150 feet. Gene goes to Jack and gets a sample bag off of his own holder, ready to receive the rocks Jack has collected with the rake.]

143:24:52 Cernan: Yes, sir. Right here. How you doing?

143:24:55 Schmitt: My hands are getting tired.

143:24:57 Cernan: Yeah. Bag 501. (Pause)

[Jack gets another short swath.]

[Throughout the EVAs, the astronauts show a tendency to speak more loudly to Houston than to each other, despite the fact that, in both cases, there is a radio link through the LCRU.]

[Jack is wondering if he is now supposed to use the rake to get a bag full - roughly a kilogram - of soil.]

143:25:17 Schmitt: Practically.

[Jack pours the rocks in the bag that Gene's holding. The checklist does not explicitly call out a kilogram of soil at this site.]

143:25:24 Schmitt: Okay. I'll use my scoop for that.

[Jack gets his scoop.]

143:25:29 Parker: Copy that, Gene. (Pause)

143:25:36 Schmitt: Okay, what do we have left here?

143:25:39 Cernan: (Consulting his checklist) We want to get a...I got the high pan. (Pause)

143:25:50 Schmitt: I don't know how we used up all the time, but we did.

143:25:53 Cernan: Okay, (on) my pan, by the way, I got extensive vertical coverage down into Nansen, Bob.

[Jack angles the scoop head.]

143:26:01 Schmitt: Well, the soil's getting into my (scoop hinge)...

143:26:03 Cernan: I don't know where the hour went that it took to drive here.

[Gene gets another sample bag.]

143:26:15 Cernan: We changed 2 hours and 40 minutes. I don't know whether that makes us older or not.

[Jack gets a scoopful of soil but drops some as he lifts the scoop. Gene's "we changed 2 hours and 40 minutes" is a reference to a delay in launch from Earth. Not wanting to alter the timing of events at the Moon, NASA decided to have them fly a quicker-than-planned trajectory to the Moon so that they reached lunar orbit at the planned time. In addition, NASA put all of the mission clocks ahead by 2:40 so that, while we are currently at 143 hours, 26 minutes on the mission clock, it has only been 140 hours, 46 minutes since launch from Earth.]

143:26:27 Cernan: Try again. I got half of it. I got three-quarters of it. 502, Bob, will be the kilogram.

[Jack gets a second scoopful.]

143:26:34 Parker: Copy that.

143:26:35 Schmitt: And that's a sample down to about 5...about 4 centimeters. Don't get (the sample bag) too close to your camera. Okay.

143:26:43 Cernan: Oh, that's a big bag full. Want to put it in mine?

[They have been putting most of the samples in Jack's SCB and Gene is offering to take some of the load.]

[Jack presents his SCB to Gene, who is twisting the sample bag shut.]

[Cernan - "We tried to distribute loads but, compared with the weight of the backpack, the weight of the SCB never bothered me. In one-sixth gravity you just couldn't put that much into one of the SCBs and I just never felt like I was carrying any extra weight."]

[At the end of the EVA - and after some redistribution of samples - they report SCB weights of 24 and 35 terrestrial pounds. At the end of EVA-3, they report two other bags at 32 pounds each. In lunar gravity, then, a full SCB would weigh 5 or 6 pounds and, while the extra weight was noticeable hanging from the side of the PLSS, it was not troublesome.]

143:26:55 Schmitt: Cooling's fine. My hands are tired.

143:26:57 Cernan : Well, that's natural.

143:26:59 Schmitt: Okay,...

143:27:00 Parker: Okay. And guys, do you see any more different blocks up there that are worth sampling before you go on down on to the flats (down near the Rover, below the break in slope) and sample the light mantle?

143:27:11 Schmitt: We haven't had a chance to look around any more than you've heard.

143:27:14 Parker: Okay.

143:27:15 Schmitt: You want a rake in the light mantle here?

[Fendell pans away.]

143:27:20 Schmitt: (To Gene) Get an "after" (photo)...Get an after, Gene. (Calling after him) Gene, get an after.

143:27:24 Cernan: Yeah. Got it, got it, got it, got it.

143:27:28 Parker: Then you might look around...

143:27:29 Schmitt: I'm sorry, Bob. Go ahead.

[Fendell returns to them.]

143:27:39 Schmitt: We will.

[Jack starts downhill; Gene takes the "after", which is AS17-137-20962.]

143:27:46 Parker: Okay; we have that. (Pause)

[Jack stops at two rocks slightly uphill from Boulder 3.]

143:27:55 Schmitt: Okay, Bob, here are two rocks side by side, a meter or two in diameter. And one is the anorthositic gabbro, if I can use the term; and the other is that two-cycle breccia.

[Here, Jack is using 'anorthositic gabbro' to describe light-colored, crystalline material such as that found in Boulder 2. The 'two-cycle' breccia is the blue-gray material of Boulder 1. Gene comes downhill using the two-footed kangaroo hop.]

143:28:15 Schmitt: Just don't stub your toe.

143:28:18 Cernan : Yeah, that's the way to come downhill.

[Cernan - "When you were going uphill, you had to take little steps and get your toes dug in. Because you didn't have as much weight holding you down as you would have on Earth and because you're center-of-mass was so high because of the backpack, it was harder to keep your balance. But coming downhill, the only trouble was - like being on a ski-slope - if you came straight downhill using that kangaroo hop, you'd get going really fast. And, if you stubbed your toe, you'd go tail over tea kettle."]

143:28:20 Cernan: Yeah.

143:28:21 Schmitt: Set up right there (Boulder 3). Let's get that...Let's get that big clast.

143:28:23 Cernan: There's a fracture right in there I want to get the...Oh, the clast.

143:28:27 Schmitt: Yeah.

143:28:28 Cernan: (Very pleased by Jack's discovery) Yes, sir. Good eye, good eye.

143:28:31 Schmitt: Big white clast in the two-cy(cle)...(correcting his terminology) in the gray-matrix breccia.

[Gene positions the gnomon.]

[Jack plants the scoop and takes a down-Sun "before" of Boulder 3. This is AS17-138- 21047.]

[Jack is saying that he think that Gene can chip the rock with the hammer. Gene backs away to take a cross-Sun stereopair, AS17-137-20963-64, while Jack takes the down-Sun. Throughout the sampling of this boulder they demonstrate just how good a sampling team they have become. They don't talk a great deal about what they are going to do; they both know what needs to be done and more or less who is going to do what.]

[Schmitt - "The purpose of the training, in my mind, was to make everything that could be routine be as routine as possible so that you didn't have to think about it and didn't have to talk about it."]

[Jack turns to the east to take a "locator" of the Rover (AS17-138-21048) then turns back to the rock and takes another before (AS17-138-21049).]

[Gene gets the hammer from his shin pocket. Jack gets the scoop.]

143:29:03 Cernan: Now, I want to try to take this piece off first. (Pause as Gene hammers)

143:29:10 Schmitt: Pretty hard, isn't it.

[Hammering sounds - a soft "plock" - can be heard through Gene's suit. He takes seven whacks at the top of the boulder on the east end.]

[Cernan - "Although we can hear on the tape that the microphone in my suit was picking up the sound of my hammering, I don't ever remember hearing it. I could certainly feel it; and I've always contended that it's a very fine line between hearing noise and feeling noise. With that hammer, when you hit something the shock went through your whole body; but I'm not sure I ever heard the noise, probably because my ears were covered with the Snoopy helmet."]

[What may be happending is that, when Gene hits the rock, the hammer rebounds against the palm of the pressurized glove, creating a sound wave in the suit loud enough to be picked up by the microphone at Gene's lips. In brief, the suit acts like a drum.]

[Cernan - "The boulder was just sitting on the soil and, as I remember, when I hit it with the hammer, it moved. That's how I knew we would be able to roll it if we wanted to."]

[Gene takes three whacks on the east face.]

[Cernan - "This is a good example of the posture you have to assume to go after a boulder that's not much more than knee high. You have to bend down in your suit to get whatever sort of leverage you can with the hammer and then swing it from the side. Normally, we'd hit it straight on in a vertical plane but, because you don't have much mobility in the suit, I was bending my right knee, bringing the hammer up across my chest (to the left), and then swinging it down to my right. So I was actually back-handing it to get at the face. You just adapted to whatever the suit would give you. And, here, when I bent down, leaning a little into the hill, the suit was actually so stiff it helped me maintain that folded-knee position without dropping all the way to my knees. This is a good example of what it took to operate in the suit and on a slope."]

143:29:25 Cernan: That clast is soft!

143:29:27 Schmitt: Can you use your blade end?

143:29:28 Cernan: Yeah. Yeah, let me get that little piece, anyway, to start with.

MP3 Audio Clip ( 16 min 41 sec )

143:29:35 Schmitt: (Grabbing the fragment with the scoop) Got it.

[Gene hits the east face twice more.]

143:29:40 Schmitt: Okay.

143:29:41 Cernan: Before we cover them up, let's get them. I got to get a sample of that mother rock.

[Jack gets one of the fragments, flexing a knee so that he can get low and skim it off of the surface with the scoop blade.]

143:29:53 Schmitt: Okay.

143:29:54 Cernan: Now, Let me see if I can't get a sample...

143:29:55 Schmitt: Want to try to hit that one more time. I think we've got another one coming there.

[Gene takes two whacks on an east corner.]

[Jack gets the sample.]

[Schmitt - "A rhyolite is a volcanic rock, usually having large crystals in a fine-grained matrix, low in iron-magnesium silicates, high in quartz and feldspar. This inclusion wasn't a rhyolite, but had a similar texture."]

[Gene hits the corner eight times.]

143:30:16 Schmitt: I think that's it. Got a bag? (Pause)

[Gene lays the hammer on the rock and gets a sample bag from his camera bracket.]

[Gene takes the scoop from Jack, grabbing it near the head, and pours the fragments in the sample bag.]

143:30:37 Schmitt: I think they are. There are three clasts, anyway...(Correcting himself) three fragments that we got off. Chips.

[Gene puts the bag in Jack's SCB.]

[Sample 72415,0 is a brecciated dunite clast weighing a little over 32 grams. It is described in Volume 1 of the Catalog of Apollo 17 Rocks, as being pale, yellowish-to-greenish gray (colors 5Y 8/1 to 5GY 8/1 in the Geological Society of America (GSA) Rock-Color Chart). The sample location is shown in a labeled version of AS17-138-21049 from the Apollo 17 Sample Catalog, Part 1 ( 29 Mb PDF ). Post-mission photos S73-16198 and S73-16199 give two different views of the sample.]

[Schmitt - "One of these fragments turned out to be the oldest dated rock ever sampled on the Moon. It was dated at 4.6 billion years, plus or minus 0.1 billion years, in a mineral isochron analysis. They really had to work at it because there wasn't a lot there; it was mostly olivine and to do a mineral isochron you've got to do separates of a number of minerals. I don't know what they found in there, ilmenite or something. And then you have to extract the lead isotopes and do an analysis on them. The revolution in mass-spectrometry techniques as a result of Apollo was just phenomenal. It was literally getting down to the point where they were counting atoms as they were coming off the samples. And that, in turn, has led to this dilemma we have in environmental consideration here on Earth in that we can now measure very small quantities of 'supposedly toxic' substances which we never knew were there before. And I say 'supposedly' because some things don't become toxic until they reach certain levels of concentration. And, at very low levels, things like copper and selenium are even necessary for good health."]

143:30:48 Schmitt: Okay. Don't get it...Okay. (Long Pause)

[Gene gets the hammer and knocks a piece off on the third stroke. The piece comes off to Gene's left and he tries to grab it. He manages to touch it and, in so doing, knocks it into Jack's left wrist. The fragment bounces off of Jack's wrist and slowly falls to the ground behind him.]

143:31:03 Schmitt: Yeah. (Pause) See it!? You hit me with it!

143:31:09 Cernan: Well, I tried to catch it. Bob, you still there?

[Gene puts the hammer in his shin pocket.]

[Jack collects the fragment, about ten feet southeast and slightly uphill.]

143:31:20 Schmitt: I got another piece of it up here.

[Perhaps four feet east and two feet uphill.]

[Gene examines the ground northeast of the rock, the direction he thinks it will roll.]

[Gene gets a bag.]

143:31:38 Schmitt: 504. Two chips with soil. (Pause)

[Jack pours the samples in the bag. The samples are 72430-35. The largest of these is 72435, a 161 g, clast-bearing, impact melt. It is described as being gray (N4 in the Geological Society of America (GSA) Rock-Color Chart) in Volume 1 of the Catalog of Apollo 17 Rocks. Public Affairs reports that crew heart rates are in the 90s.]

143:31:47 Schmitt: What? The bag?

143:31:48 Cernan: Yeah.

143:31:49 Schmitt: No. Just the scoop.

143:31:50 Cernan: Just make sure they're closed so they don't...

143:31:53 Schmitt: I wore my hand out holding that camera together coming out here.

[Gene puts the sample bag in Jack's SCB.]

[Gene is standing just north of the rock; Jack moves east just far enough to get his shadow off the rock. Gene's "after" is AS17-137- 20965.]

[Jack turns around and moves a few steps east and a little downhill to a small crater full of rocky debris. Gene's close-ups are AS17-137-20965 to 20973. He has used his tongs to make sure he is at the right distance from the rock for a good focus. The best of these pictures is probably 20971.]

143:32:18 Schmitt: Hey, Bob, while he's doing that, there's a real good example of a pit-bottom crater up here even on this talus slope. I'll try to take a stereo of it.

143:32:33 Parker: Okay, Jack, that sounds great. I guess there's always a problem of getting the in-place glass, if you think that's appropriate at this point. Word along those lines, though, is we'd like to have you in the Rover moving in 11 minutes; so it's probably not appropriate at this time on that.

[Jack moves two short hops downhill for another stereo picture. In all, he takes three pictures of the crater: AS17-138-21050 to 21052.]

143:32:51 Parker: Okay; copy that.

143:32:53 Schmitt: It's just bigger than the average crater. And it still has that pit, the pit being about a third of the inner diameter of the crater...make it a fourth of the rim diameter, that's easier.

143:33:11 Parker: Copy that.

[Gene is now SW and a little uphill of Boulder 3.]

143:33:13 Schmitt: Can I look at that closely?

143:33:16 Cernan: Look at what?

143:33:18 Schmitt: Hold the rake a second. (Pause)

[Jack hands Gene the rake and leans on the boulder.]

143:33:26 Parker: We'd like to have you moving in one-zero (10) minutes, which means: allow the usual 3 or 4 or 5 minutes for close-out before that time.

143:33:36 Cernan: Okay, we'll get hustling.

[Jack gets up with some difficulty, using the rock and the scoop for support.]

143:33:40 Schmitt: Okay, Bob, that white-colored inclusion we sampled looks like a strange...

143:33:47 Cernan: Look out, Jack.

[Standing uphill of the rock, Gene pushes it with his right foot. Jack moves quickly out of the way to the east. The boulder rocks forward slightly then falls back. Gene gives it a harder kick and the boulder turns over twice as it rolls.]

[Schmitt - "There was a lot of boulder-rolling discussion on the field trips. Mostly, Gene just rolled this one for fun but, by doing so, he exposed the soil underneath and we got a sample of it."]

[On Apollo 12, Conrad rolled a rock into Head Crater in order to generate a signal for the ALSEP seismometer. And, on Apollos 15 and 16, the crews turned boulders over so that they could sample the soil underneath.]

[As it reaches him, Jack kicks the rock toward the north but it is stopped by a small rise. He tries another kick, but with little effect.]

143:34:02 Cernan: Get that sample under there, Jack. Under that rock.

143:34:07 Schmitt: Okay. Got a bag?

143:34:09 Cernan: Got a bag.

143:34:12 Schmitt: The soil from right underneath the rock - down to about 4 centimeters (depth) - (is going) in 505.

[Gene is standing a little uphill, so Jack has to raise his arm quite high to pour the sample into the bag. Jack skims a second sample while Gene closes the first bag.]

143:34:39 Cernan: Bob, this big white clast, I'm not sure there aren't some smaller ones in some of those other big boulders. That's just an intuitive guess.

[Gene has the second bag open, just as Jack raises the skim sample.]

143:34:47 Cernan: But we never saw any as obviously big and gross as this one.

[Jack does a little jump to get the skim sample out of the scoop and into the bag.]

[Jack presents his SCB.]

143:35:06 Cernan: On the soil.

143:35:09 Parker: And by now, probably the best thing for you guys...

143:35:11 Schmitt: Bob, that rock...

143:35:11 Parker: ...to do is to go back to the Rover and pick up the rake sample. Go ahead, Jack.

[Gene has the samples in Jack's SCB and turns to get the gnomon.]

143:35:21 Cernan: Okay.

143:35:22 Schmitt: (To Bob) That white clast...I looked at it, and it has light, pastel-green, fairly-rounded crystals in a fine-grained white to light pinkish-tan matrix. And you can figure that one out. Looks like olivine in something.

[Schmitt - "As it turned out, it was olivine in olivine; almost a pure olivine rock. So it's interesting that I made that guess up there. Olivine has a vitreous luster and a light greenish color but, again, in this case it was chunks of olivine in a crushed matrix of olivine that had been through the mill for four-and-a-half billion years."]

[Gene is using the kangaroo hop to get downhill; Jack is using alternating steps and doesn't seem to be moving as quickly. To get started, Gene used a few alternating steps to get up to speed.]

[Schmitt - "The cross-country skiing motion, I think, takes less energy than the kangaroo hop because I was just sort of moving my ankles, not flexing the suit as much. I always seemed to wear out faster when I tried hopping versus the semi-stride."]

143:35:51 Schmitt: It might be a...(Responding to Bob) No, the colors aren't that distinct, Bob. I'm just giving you shades.

Video Clip ( 3 min 44 sec 1.0 Mb RealVideo or 37 Mb MPEG )

143:35:59 Parker: Okay; Roger.

[Jack reaches the Rover. He has been carrying the scoop in his left hand with the handle forward and the head back and pointing at the ground. He tosses it like a baton, getting it to rotate so that, after he catches it, he can mount it on the gate with the head pointing up.]

[Schmitt - "You got to where you were doing things like that all the time. Things moved very slowly and the best flexibility you had in any part of the suit was in the wrist; so you took advantage of it."]

143:36:16 Parker: Okay, we'll...

143:36:17 Cernan: It's down to your right.

143:36:18 Parker: Okay. We'll send Ed (Fendell) over there to look at it.

143:36:22 Cernan: Well, I'll help him (by manually pointing the TV). I don't think you got enough time.

[Jack stows the scoop; Gene stows the gnomon and then goes to turn the TV.]

143:36:28 Schmitt: (Talking to Gene under Bob) Where's your gnomon? We've got to get a rake sample.

143:36:34 Cernan: Okay.

143:36:35 Schmitt: (Headed north from the Rover) I'm going to have to move out here a ways, Geno.

143:36:38 Cernan: Okay. Coming right there. (Pause)

[Gene points the TV into Nansen.]

143:36:45 Parker: Okay. We're going to check it out; thank you. (Pause)

143:36:54 Cernan: (Getting the gnomon out again) And there's no sense trying to get 500's up...Well, we'll see what happens.

[Gene takes the gnomon to Jack.]

143:37:12 Cernan: Yeah, I was going to say there's no sense in trying to get them up the Massif; I don't think you'll see anything up there.

143:37:16 Parker: Okay. (Pause)

[Jack is taking a black-and-white pan from the second rake site northeast of the Rover. Jack's pan consists of frames AS17-138- 21053 to 21073.]

[David Harland has assembled the portion showing - from left to right - Gene, the Rover, and Nansen.] [Frame 21069 is a great picture of Gene.]

[Frame 21073 shows the Station 2 boulders.

143:37:23 Cernan: You getting your pan?

143:37:24 Schmitt: Yeah, I said...

143:37:25 Cernan: Where do you want it (the gnomon for the rake sample)?

[Fendell pans counter-clockwise.]

143:37:28 Cernan: I'll get the "before" and the "locator".

[The cross-Sun "befores" of the rake site are AS17-137- 20974 and 20975. They show Jack taking his pan. Frames 20976 and 20977 are "locators" to the Rover.]

[Fendell pans clockwise.]

143:38:10 Schmitt: (Laughing) (It's) tiring to take pictures.

143:38:12 Cernan: Yeah. Let me tell you, you just got to think an order of magnitude bigger than what you're normally are accustomed to thinking.

143:38:20 Schmitt: Okay, pan's complete.

143:38:21 Cernan: Let's get the rake sample so we can move on. (Pause) Bob, I couldn't get those 500's anyway. It would require me to pitch up (lean back) too far, and there's no way I could do it.

[Fendell finds Gene and Jack well north of the Rover.]

143:38:43 Cernan: I know. I'm just mulling it over, but there really isn't any way I could get them.

143:38:47 Parker: Okay.

[Jack is taking swaths by running forward three or four steps, dragging the rake behind him. Each of the swaths, then is about two meters long.]

143:38:53 Cernan: How are your hands? Let me rake that a little bit.

143:38:55 Schmitt: Well, it's all right; there just aren't any rocks. Should have brought the scoop and used the old shovel trick.

[Jack has made at least five rake swaths by this time.]

143:39:13 Parker: Okay, do you have any feeling (that) you have that hard layer underneath there like you did yesterday, when you raked at Station 1, Jack?

143:39:19 Cernan: There's one under the gnomon you can get.

143:39:23 Schmitt: Several I thought were rocks turned out to be clods.

143:39:25 Cernan: Yeah, that's what most of them are is clods. How do you get clods if it's never been wet? You're not getting any. You've had three in there ever since the last four scoops.

143:39:35 Schmitt: There just aren't many.

[Jack raises the rake to pour the fragments in the sample bag Gene is holding. He has taken at least seven swaths.]

[Schmitt - "We were out on the light mantle, which we thought was an avalanche. If it is an avalanche, you wouldn't expect many rock fragments; they would have worked their way downward in a gas-lubricated avalanche (flow) and all that would be at the surface would be fines. If the surface were old enough, you would find a few fragments, all of them thrown in from elsewhere."]

143:39:38 Cernan: 507.

143:39:39 Parker: Okay, copy 507, very few.

143:39:41 Cernan: Three rocks. Yeah, you got about four rocks about 2 inches and smaller.

[One of the rocks is a 51-gram 'impact melt breccia' - sample 72735 - that is at least 3.85 billion years old.]

143:39:52 Parker: Okay, let's just get the soil and...

143:39:53 Schmitt: (To Gene) Okay. And we want to get the soil.

143:39:54 Parker: ...press on. We'd like to move in 3 minutes, 3 minutes.

143:40:02 Cernan: Okay, you got it (the down-Sun picture)?

143:40:04 Schmitt: Yeah.

[Jack's down-Sun "after" of the second rake site is AS17-138-21074.]

143:40:08 Schmitt: (Puzzled) Forget the soil?

143:40:10 Cernan: He wants us moving in 3 minutes. So let's go.

143:40:13 Schmitt: Well...

143:40:14 Parker: No, get the soil, guys. Get the soil. Don't forget the soil; get the soil.

143:40:19 Schmitt: Yeah, we want it.

143:40:22 Cernan: (Hearing Bob) I'm sorry, I thought you said to skip it.

143:40:24 Schmitt: (To Gene) Got your bag?

143:40:25 Cernan: (Just getting a bag open) Yep.

143:40:26 Schmitt: May be a little messy.

143:40:28 Cernan: That's all right. (Pause)

143:40:40 Schmitt: (Pouring) One-scoop-Schmitt, they call me. That's good.

143:40:42 Cernan: (To Bob, calling) That's bag 508.

[This 885-gram soil sample is 72701. Its composition is similar to other sample taken in the 'light mantle' areas visited during this traverse.]

[Gene opens Jack's SCB after getting the sample bag sealed.]

143:40:57 Schmitt: Is it so full we ought to change it?

143:41:00 Cernan: Yep. Let's do that after we get to the next station, though.

143:41:04 Schmitt: Well, okay.

[Schmitt - "I suspect that I didn't want to drive a long distance on the Rover with a full SCB; if the top came open we could have lost samples."]

143:41:06 Schmitt: Yeah, let's go.

[Jack starts toward the Rover using a high-speed, long-stride lope which he has earlier described as a cross-country skiing stride.]

143:41:10 Schmitt: That we messed up. (Pause)

[Having taken AS17-137- 20978 Gene starts back to the Rover, carrying the gnomon.]

[Gene is going at a rapid pace. Fendell follows him for a while, then does a final site pan.]

[Schmitt - "Gene started out doing the kangaroo hop for a little ways and then went into a left-foot-forward skip. He wasn't getting very high off the ground because you can see his toe kicking dirt almost every step. Anybody wanting to estimate how fast two relatively tired people could go should look at this sequence. This one sequence could give you a lot of information about walkback. I'm glad we didn't have to do that."]

[Cernan - "It was a good station; we got a lot done. We'd joked around with the Falcon code - which I'd learned in the Navy - during training but, you notice, it was Bob who brought it up. There were about twenty Falcon phrases, and Falcon 109 was 'Beautiful; just fucking beautiful.'"]

143:41:50 Schmitt: I can see. There's a light-colored fragment (means "layer") I think we break into.

143:41:52 Cernan: Yeah, we kick it up.

143:41:53 Schmitt: They're light-colored clods.

[Schmitt - "The way I responded to Gene makes me think that I had noticed the buried layer of lighter material and had filed it away in the back of my brain while we were working. And it's a good thing he brought it up, because otherwise we wouldn't have noticed it at this point."]

[Schmitt - " I think Gene is comparing the depth of his footprints in the light mantle with those he made in the talus slope where we sampled the boulders. From the fact that we got (rock) fragments on the talus slope but not in the light mantle tells me that we had a finer material on the light mantle and I expect we were sinking in farther down there. This section is confusing, there's a lot of (verbal) shorthand."]

143:42:01 Cernan: Yes, sir.

143:42:02 Schmitt: I'll get one out. We can use this one.

Video Clip ( 3 min 41 sec 1.0 Mb RealVideo or 36 Mb MPEG )

143:42:04 Cernan: Yeah. Because we want to get rolling. (Pause)

[Fendell looks into Nansen again.]

143:42:35 Schmitt: Did our (gravimeter) reading change much, Bob?

143:42:38 Parker: Which one?

[Schmitt - "I was wondering if we got a big gravity change as we got up onto the Massif. We did, but I don't know if anybody ever told me about it."]

[There is no further discussion of the Station 2 gravimeter reading anywhere in the transcript.]

143:42:42 Cernan: Yeah, it is locked; make sure the cap's locked. (To Bob) Okay, bag 8 is on the gate, and Jack's getting bag 4.

143:42:48 Parker: Okay; copy that. (Pause)

[That is, Gene is putting SCB-4 on Jack's PLSS. Note that Jack had been wearing SCB-8.]

143:43:01 Parker: You copy on the SEP receiver turn on and temperature?

143:43:06 Schmitt: Right.

143:43:09 Cernan: (To Jack) Is my bag closed? (Responding to Bob) We got that, Bob.

143:43:14 Schmitt: Your bag is closed.

143:43:15 Cernan: Okay.

143:43:17 Schmitt: Okay...

143:43:18 Parker: Okay. 17, take all that back, we've just had a change of heart back here. And we're not going to turn the SEP on, just cover it up. And you might give us a temperature reading as you go by; that'll help us think what to do with it.

[Schmitt - "They were realizing that the SEP was running awfully hot and, probably because we were going to retrace our tracks, they thought that they might save it for the final traverse by leaving it off and covered."]

143:43:31 Parker: Copy 98; then leave them both off. (Pause)

143:43:38 Schmitt: Okay.

[The SEP has cooled down from 105 F during the stop.]

[They have just mounted SCB-8 on the gate.]

143:43:56 Parker: Roger on that.

143:43:58 Cernan: Their advice has been pretty good, so far.

143:44:02 Parker: I won't pass that on to them. I think they...(Pause)

143:44:15 Cernan: These locks (on the tool gate) are clamming up (with dust), Jack. I can't unlock that one now. (Pause) Can you lock that one? (Pause) They're all getting sticky.

[Fendell finds them at the gate. The locks referred to here are clamps to hold SCBs on the gate.]

143:44:38 Cernan: Let me see.

143:44:40 Schmitt: It isn't moving either way.

143:44:44 Cernan: This one was sticky, too. Let me see. (Pause)

143:44:49 Schmitt: Out's Open, right?

143:44:50 Cernan: Huh?

143:44:51 Schmitt: Out is Open...

143:44:52 Cernan: Out is Open, yeah. Let me try once more, if I have to...

143:44:55 Schmitt: Here I got it.

143:44:56 Cernan: Okay, those are really getting dusty. I'll hit those with a dustbrush next time around. (Pause)

[Jack carries SCB-8 to his seat.]

[Jack is saying that they wouldn't have lost the time if they hadn't been told to remove the bag from the gate and put it under the seat. Of course, a little lost time would be minor compared with lost samples.]

143:45:24 Cernan: Okay. I got to get the (TV) camera. Okay, Bob, I'm taking your camera.

143:45:31 Parker: Okay, looks like it's in the right place, you won't have to turn it around. Good coordination.

[Fendell has the TV pointed down and aft, the proper position for the traverse.]

[TV off.]

143:46:07 Cernan: Okay.

143:46:09 Parker: And we'd like frames when it's convenient on you guys.

143:46:16 Schmitt: Okay, Bob. (Pause) Okay. LMP is at 46.

143:46:20 Parker: Copy that.

143:46:21 Cernan: And CDR is at - if I stop long enough - 113.

143:46:28 Parker: Copy. 113. (Pause)

MP3 Audio Clip ( 20 min 01 sec )

143:46:34 Cernan: Oh, look at that! Boy, I tell you. (Pause)

[Heavy breathing as they mount the Rover. At some point after Jack gets seated, Gene takes a picture of the rear of the Rover, AS17-137- 20979. The blue object at the back of the Rover above the replacement fender is the Traverse Gravimeter.]