Mysteries from the Moon

IN Houston last week, Apollo 16 Astronauts John Young, Charles Duke and Tom Mattingly took time out from their debriefings to hold a news conference at which they showed off their lunar camera work. "No picture can do justice to the beauty of the scene," said Mattingly as he pointed to one moonscape, "and this is no exception." Nonetheless the films shot by the Apollo 16 astronauts are among the best ever taken in space; they provide an extraordinarily realistic sense of what it is like to land, walk and ride on the moon.

Movie footage taken through a window of the descending lunar module Orion offers a panoramic view of the rubbled Cayley Plains, the craters looming ever larger. Then a black speck appears on the approaching surface, expanding rapidly until it is recognizable as Orion's sharp, spidery shadow, and finally disappearing in a swirl of gray dust as the lander touches on the surface. There are also still shots that strikingly convey the eerie desolation of lunar distances. None is more dramatic than one that shows the Lunar Rover parked on the far edge of a yawning crater while Astronaut Duke picks up soil samples in the foreground (see color pages). One alarming view of Orion, shot from Casper by Mattingly, shows mysteriously damaged panels on the side of the lunar module as it returns from the surface of the moon.

Some of the most exciting film involves the electric-powered Lunar Rover. One sequence, shot from the Rover, provides a driver's-eye view of the passing landscape as the little vehicle skitters across the rock-littered surface. Others show the Rover bouncing off rocks as Astronaut John Young hot-rods along the Cayley Plains or throwing up rooster tails of moon dust as he puts it through a series of skidding, Le Mans-type racing turns. "It's simply a superb vehicle," said the high-spirited Duke after his return to Houston. The vehicle's designers could only agree. NASA engineers announced that they were delighted with the moon buggy and said that they planned no changes in it for December's Apollo 17 mission.

The NASA medical men were equally impressed with the functioning of the astronauts. Suspecting that potassium loss may have been responsible for abnormal heart rates in two of Apollo 15's crew members, NASA Director of Life Sciences Dr. Charles Berry had placed the Apollo 16 astronauts on a diet rich in the essen-salt before and during their mission (TIME, May 1). The precaution appears to have paid off. None of the astronauts experienced more than minimal and predictable heart irregularities. Furthermore, postflight examinations revealed that their potassium levels were normal and that no other physical problems had arisen.

But the mission did produce its share of mysteries. Among them:

> The Cayley Plains have an unexpectedly strong magnetic field by lunar standards. An orbiting magnetometer hinted during the Apollo 15 mission that the moon's ancient highlands had stronger magnetic fields than the low-lying lunar seas. A magnetometer at the Apollo 16's Descartes landing site confirmed that suspicion; it showed that Cayley was five to ten times more magnetic than the lowlands. The discovery has led scientists to surmise that the moon's magnetic field was much stronger early in lunar history. It has also strengthened the belief of geologists like Dr. Palmer Dyall, one of the investigators in the magnetometer experiments, that the moon spun faster in its youth and had a molten iron core similar to the earth's; movements within the liquid core of the rotating earth are believed to generate the terrestrial magnetic field.

> One rock from the Descartes area was four or five times as radioactive as those picked up in the lowlands by Apollo 15, though less than those found by Apollo 14. The reason for this high radioactivity is unknown, but Dr. Farouk El-Baz, a geologist, believes the rock "must be a foreign piece which is not representative of the landing site. The only way it can have gotten there is by being thrown in by impact."

> Rock samples picked up by Apollo 16's astronauts were dramatically different from what scientists expected them to find at the site. It had been predicted that the Cayley Plains and the surrounding mountains would be scattered with igneous, or volcanic rock, but all the stones unpacked so far by scientists seem to be fragments called breccias--a melange of chips, crystals and soil welded together either by volcanism or the impact of a meteor. Geologists believe that some of the samples, rich in aluminum, may represent the scum that formed on the lunar surface as the moon cooled; the lighter, aluminum-rich material would float to the surface. But they have no explanation for the origins of another sample that is a dense, almost basaltic rock peppered with tiny glasslike crystals. "It could be a rapidly crystallized igneous rock," says Dr. Paul Cast, chief of NASA'S earth and planetary division, "or it could also be a high-grade metamorphic rock formed by impact." Whatever it is, Gast believes that the rock collection could prove useful in unlocking some of the secrets of the moon's formation. Said he: "The amount of information about the lunar highlands in these rocks far exceeds our hopes."

Extracting that information will not be easy. NASA'S scientists have only begun the task of uncrating the 213-lb. geological treasure trove the astronauts brought back with them; they estimate that it will take weeks just to weigh and catalogue each sample. Even the most optimistic of the space agency's scientists figure that months will pass before all of the rocks have been fully examined, and many feel it could take another Apollo mission to help decipher their messages.

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