Apollo 16 documentaire NASA lune 5 eme alunissage

Video from the channel info documentaires sciences about Apollo 16, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 28:25. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A period documentary about Apollo 16 that follows the mission day by day with footage and audio from the crew and mission control. John Young was the commander; Ken Mattingly was the command module pilot in charge of the experiments in lunar orbit, and Charles Duke accompanied Young in exploring the Descartes plateau.

The mission, presented as the fifth crewed Moon landing, lifted off on April 16, 1972, after a launch vehicle gyroscope problem was resolved less than an hour before launch. The trip to the Moon had only minor issues, such as paint flaking off the lunar module, and on April 19 the spacecraft entered lunar orbit. On April 20, after the modules had separated, Mattingly did not perform the circularization burn because the main engine's backup control system showed oscillations. The two spacecraft moved closer together in case they needed to dock while teams from the Manned Spacecraft Center, MIT and North American analyzed the fault in a simulator; once it was confirmed that the oscillations caused no damage with the engine firing, the descent was authorized, about six hours behind schedule.

On the first excursion, on April 21, the astronauts set up an ultraviolet camera for the first astronomical observations from the Moon and an experiment station, although the heat flow experiment was disabled when a cable came loose; they also probed the subsurface with explosive charges, and Young measured the strongest magnetic field ever recorded on the Moon. The second excursion climbed a bit more than 4 km toward Stone Mountain, with six sampling stops. The third, on April 23, reached North Ray crater, the largest sampled up to then, where they found an enormous boulder. On April 25 Mattingly went outside at 173,000 miles from Earth to retrieve the film, and on April 27 the spacecraft splashed down and was recovered by the Ticonderoga.