ASTRONAUTS’ CAMP SITE ON MOON

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32663, 20 July 1971, Page 13

ASTRONAUTS’ CAMP SITE ON MOON

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) CAPE KENNEDY, July 19. The two Apollo 15 astronauts who will land on the moon, Colonel David Scott and Lieu-tenant-Colonel James Irwin, plan to camp for three days in a basin cut by a winding canyon and flanked by battered mountains.

“I expect it to be very, very impressive,” Colonel Scott, the commander of the mission, said today. “To be in an area where you can look in one direction and see 15,000 feet of mountain and in another direction a canyon almost a mile across and a thousand feet deep that’s just got to be something.” It is probably some of the most rugged terrain or “lurain” as astronauts call it men will ever explore on the moon.

The touch-down site itself, on the fringe of what is called the Marsh of Decay, is

relatively smooth, as seen from photographs taken by moon satellites; it resembles the cratered flatlands visited by the Apollo 11 and 12 astronauts in 1969. But two miles to the south is the base of the 12,000fthigh Apennine front. Mount Hadley, one of the tallest peaks on the moon, rises 15,000 feet seven miles to the north-west, and the canyon, called Hadley Rille, is about a half mile to the west.

The Apennines, named after a mountain range in Italy, rise higher above the basin floor than the towering east face of the Sierra Nevadas, in California, or the great Himalayan front that juts above the plains of India. Hadley Rille, like Mount Hadley and several craters in the area, was named after John Hadley, an eighteen century British scientist who improved the reflector telescope design and invented an ancestor of the mariner’s sextant. Puzzling canyon The canyon, representative of several puzzling rilles on the moon, is similar in size to the Rio Grande Gorge, near Taos, New Mexico, which Colonels Scott and Irwin have visited.

Hadley Rille meanders down from an elongated de-

pression in the Apennines and cuts the Swamp of Decay, merging with another rille 62 miles to the north. Scientists do not know what formed the canyon, but

there is some agreement that it was probably formed by volcanic action, and possibly was a lava channel. There has been speculation in the past that such rilles were formed by water, because they resemble river beds on earth.

The Apennines ring the south-eastern edge of the Great Sea of Rains which was blasted out by the explosive impact of an asteroid about 4000 million years ago. Geologists believe that the Apennines were lifted up by the shock of the impact and were shaped by a network of faults.

Besides the mountains and canyon, the astronauts will explore a cluster of craters apparently formed by material splattered out of the large craters Aristillus and Autolycus, to the north-west, and a series of hills to the north which may be volcanic domes. The Apollo 15 landing site, named Hadley-Apennine after its most prominent features, is the most northern landing area selected in the Apollo programme.

It is 465 miles north of the lunar ;uator and 660 miles north-east of the Apollo 14 landing site.

On moon maps, the Apollo 15 area is at latitude 26 degrees 5 minutes north and longitude 3 degrees 39 minutes east.

The Apollo 15 count-down, lasting 104 hours and 30 minutes, is due to begin tomorrow, for the launching at 1.34 a.m. New Zealand time on Tuesday of next week. Preparations for the countdown began yesterday, when engineers turned on the power in the lunar module. Falcon, and began preliminary checks of its systems. Other experts are working on the command module, Endeavour. Colonels Scott and Irwin and the Endeavour’s pilot, [ Major Alfred Wordoq took ' the day off. They went flying ' in their T3B jet trainers-from the Air Force’s Patrick base, and later relaxed in their isolation quarters at the Cape Kennedy moonport. They are expected to spend most of the remainder of this week perfecting their skills in spacecraft trainers, 1 reviewing the scientific goals of their mission, and study- ! ing the flight plans for their i 12-day, seven-hour mission, • the longest in the Apollo series.