Treasure from the Moon

Even to veteran splashdown watchers Apollo 16's return to earth last week was a spectacle of rare beauty. The slow blossoming of the spacecraft's three orange and white parachutes against the bright, azure sky seemed designed for maximum drama. Then, in a final demonstration of precision, the spacecraft Casper hit the water only one mile off the bow of the recovery carrier Ti-tonderoga. Once out of its natural element, Casper immediately capsized; it bobbed nose down in the choppy South Pacific for five minutes until the astronauts--strapped in upside-down and rapidly becoming queasy--righted it with three flotation bags. That brief misadventure could not come close to dampening the exuberance of Astronauts John Young, Charles Duke and Ken Mattingly as they arrived for their red-carpet welcome on the Ticonderoga's flight deck. "By golly," said Young, "you taxpayers--we taxpayers--got your money's worth."

No doubt about it. For all the problems they had encountered on the way to the moon and in the process of setting up their experiments, the Apollo 16 astronauts scored a scientific triumph. Young and Duke spent 20 hours and 14 minutes prowling the lunar surface, only three-quarters of an hour short of their original goal. They also collected so much moon material that they nearly ran out of collection bags. Most significant of all, the next to last Apollo mission has already given scientists valuable new details about the terrain that makes up more than 80% of the lunar surface: the rugged and ancient highlands.

Wrong Reasons. Some of the findings were surprising indeed. Although geologists had forecast that there would be a trove of heat-formed crystalline rocks on the Descartes region's Cayley Plains, most of what the astronauts and their cameras saw were fragments called breccias, which are forged together from still more ancient rocks. At the very least, that unexpected finding means that the Cayley Plains were formed, not simply by volcanic flows, but by far more complex geological processes. Said NASA Geochemist Robin Brett: "We went to the right place for the wrong reasons."

To complicate the picture further, Young and Duke logged the highest magnetic readings ever recorded on the moon's surface, possibly the residue of an ancient magnetic field. The readings thus provide new support for the disputed theory that the moon once rotated rapidly and had a molten iron core. Acting like a dynamo as the moon spun through space, this core could have created a strong lunar magnetic field.

Much of the lunar material was gathered at the beginning of the week during the third and final EVA (extravehicular activity) by Young and Duke on the plains of Descartes. With helpful navigational guidance from Houston, 240,000 miles away, the astronauts drove their $12 million moon cart to the very rim of a large feature called North Ray Crater, some three miles away from the lunar lander, Orion. As the rover's television camera followed them, they threaded their way down North Ray's steep slopes, going deeper into a large crater than any of the eight previous moon walkers. Inside the crater wall, they chipped away at a huge house-sized boulder that might be at least 4 billion years old.

The moon walkers also gathered a valuable "shadowed" sample of lunar soil from what Duke called a "gopher hole" under a large rock. Shielded from the sun's relentless rays, the sample may still contain volatile chemicals that would otherwise have long ago been "boiled off" by the intense solar heat. Finally, as the long EVA drew to a close, the astronauts headed back toward Orion, setting a lunar record of 1 1 m.p.h. in their electric-powered cart and drawing a mild rebuke from Houston for speeding.

While the rover's remote-controlled camera-provided spectators on earth with a grandstand view, Orion's upper stage shot up above a spray of colored debris from the lower stage's protective gold foil. The camera worked so well that Houston could follow Orion's ascent for nearly two minutes, until the little craft was no more than a speck of light against the utter blackness of space. Later, after Orion locked with Casper in moon orbit, Young and Duke rejoined Mattingly, who could not resist twitting them about all the dust and debris they were bringing with them. Later, having nearly obscured their original check lists with fresh flight data radioed by Houston, Duke and Young apparently overlooked one item and forgot to close a circuit breaker in Orion. Result: when the Lunar Module was finally cast loose from the mother ship, its computer could not fire its small thruster rockets. Thus, Orion could not be sent crashing back onto the moon's surface, where telling shock waves from its impact were to have been recorded by sensitive seismometers. Instead, the now-useless craft was left to orbit indefinitely around the moon.

Exposing Microbes. Other scientific work on the 3 1/2-day return journey went more smoothly. At a distance of some 174,000 miles from earth, Mattingly emerged from the cabin to retrieve cassettes of film from Casper's scientific equipment bay. During the televised "space walk," Mattingly also exposed a small container holding some 60 million microbes--bacteria, fungi, viruses--to the direct ultraviolet rays of the sun. From the test, scientists hope to learn whether intense ultraviolet radiation, as well as other conditions encountered in spaceflight, has any genetic effects on microorganisms.

On the eve of their splashdown, the astronauts answered reporters' questions relayed by Mission Control during a televised press conference. "We've seen as much in ten days," Young concluded, "as most people see in ten lifetimes." He may have been too modest. For all of the mission's mishaps, the information gathered during the flight of Apollo 16 may well enable man to "see" back to the very beginnings of his world.

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