Apollo 15 The Mission That Changed Lunar Exploration

Video from the channel apollo11space about Apollo 15, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 20:19. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Narrated documentary presenting Apollo 15 (AS-510) as the mission that turned moon landings into field exploration. It covers the Hadley–Apennine site, the descent, the three surface excursions with the lunar roving vehicle, the orbital science and the return, using NASA archive footage.

Apollo 15 was the first J mission of the program: a longer stay, more scientific equipment, improved suits, a heavier lunar module and, for the first time, an electric vehicle. The crew consisted of commander David Scott, command module pilot Alfred Worden and lunar module pilot James Irwin. Endeavour was the command and service module, and Falcon the lunar module. The site was chosen because it combined two geologies: Hadley Rille, a sinuous channel probably of volcanic origin, and the Apennine Mountains, part of the rim of the Imbrium basin, with material possibly coming from deep layers of the crust. While Scott and Irwin worked on the surface, Worden mapped the Moon from orbit with the SIM-bay instruments.

Falcon descended on the steepest approach to date, about 26°, and landed on 30 July 1971. Scott finished the descent manually amid a lot of suspended dust. Before the first moonwalk he made a stand-up EVA through the upper hatch to study the terrain. The Rover, weighing about 460 pounds on Earth, had four mesh wheels with their own motors, front and rear steering, and a television camera controlled from Earth. Scott was the first to drive a vehicle on another world. The first traverse went to the Elbow and St. George craters, next to Hadley Rille. The crew set up the ALSEP, and drilling for the heat-flow probes required a great deal of effort. The second traverse climbed toward the base of Mount Hadley Delta, where the Genesis Rock appeared, a plagioclase-rich anorthosite linked to the primitive crust. The third recovered the deep core sample and reached the edge of the rille, but had to skip the stop at the North Complex. Scott repeated Galileo's principle with a hammer and a feather. On 2 August, the Rover's camera broadcast a lunar liftoff for the first time. Worden performed a deep-space spacewalk to retrieve the camera film, and on 7 August the capsule splashed down in the Pacific with one parachute not fully deployed. In total they covered 17.5 miles and brought back more than 170 pounds of samples.