Apollo 15 in auto sulla Luna, con un piccolo scandalo....

Video from the channel Il COSMo about Apollo 15, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 15:30. Language: Italian. Video type: Documentary.

An educational piece in Italian about Apollo 15, the third-to-last mission of the program and the first of the three J-class missions, with a strongly scientific character. It reviews the mission's technical innovations, its progress on the lunar surface and the later controversy over the items the crew carried without declaring them.

The crew consisted of David Scott, James Irwin and Alfred Worden, and the chosen site was Hadley Rille. The video explains the changes from previous missions: an improved lunar module able to stay on the surface for more than two days, more flexible suits, a scientific instrument module in the service module with cameras, a laser altimeter, spectrometers and a small subsatellite, and the lunar roving vehicle, built by Boeing and driven by four electric motors, one per wheel.

After launching on 26 July 1971, Scott and Irwin landed and carried out three moonwalks: the first lasted 6 h 32 min and the second 7 h 12 min, during which they collected the Genesis Rock. In total they gathered 77 kg of rocks and soil samples. Scott repeated Galileo's falling-bodies experiment with a hammer and a falcon feather, and the crew left a plaque and a small statuette in memory of the astronauts and cosmonauts who had died. Worden went outside to retrieve the camera film. During splashdown one of the three parachutes failed. According to the video, NASA later discovered that the astronauts had carried far more postal covers than had been agreed, and none of them flew with a crew again.