Apollo 15 - In The Mountains Of The Moon - Documentary, 1971, NASA, 4K Remaster

Video from the channel Retro Space HD about Apollo 15, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 27:51. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

A remastered NASA film about the Apollo 15 mission (AS-510) that follows the full journey using footage shot during the mission and audio from the communications. It opens with the lunar module Falcon, flown by Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, descending over the peaks of the lunar Apennines until it lands on a plain between those mountains and Hadley Rille, while Al Worden remains in orbit aboard the command module Endeavour. It then goes back to the launch and the outbound journey, and afterwards covers the three surface excursions: the test of the lunar rover, whose front steering fails on the first day and works again on the second; the stop at Elbow crater and the arrival at St. George crater; the setup of the science station and the difficult drilling for the heat-flow probes; sampling along the Apennine Front; and the visit to the edge of Hadley Rille to collect a rock fragment considered bedrock.

The footage was shot during the mission itself: the launch on 26 July 1971 at 9:34 a.m., the lunar surface in the Hadley region between 31 July and departure, lunar orbit, and the return to Earth, with splashdown on 7 August. The surface images come from the astronauts' cameras and from the Rover's television camera, operated from mission control in Houston.

The film stresses the mission's scientific weight. In orbit, Worden operated a mapping camera, a panoramic camera, a laser altimeter and experiments on crustal composition, and spotted fields of volcanic cinder cones. On the surface, the crew collected the so-called Genesis Rock, with twinned crystals, interpreted as a fragment of the Moon's primordial crust, and extracted a core roughly 2.6 metres deep with 58 distinct layers. The crew returned with about 1,400 photographs. Before lift-off, Scott postmarks an envelope and simultaneously drops a hammer and a falcon feather to confirm Galileo's finding. On the way back, the crew releases a subsatellite into lunar orbit, Worden retrieves the camera film during a spacewalk, and one of the three parachutes fails with no consequences. At the end, Scott recalls the plaque bearing fourteen names of astronauts and cosmonauts who died, left on the Moon alongside a small figurine.