Apolo 17

Video from the channel Focus about Apollo 17, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 8:17. Language: Italian. Video type: Documentary.

An Italian-language documentary piece from the Focus channel covering the Apollo 17 mission with footage shot aboard and on the lunar surface: docking, life aboard the spacecraft, lunar module separation, the landing, the moonwalks and the return to Earth. It also takes stock of the Apollo programme as a whole.

Apollo 17 launched on 7 December 1972 as the programme's final mission. The crew named the capsule America and the lunar module Challenger. Cernan and Schmitt landed on 11 December at Taurus-Littrow, about 700 km northeast of the Apollo 11 landing site. This region lies on the boundary between the older highlands and the more recently formed Sea of Serenity. Schmitt was the first geologist on the Moon. As the programme's legacy, the video highlights the joint work of very different disciplines toward a single goal.

The Saturn V's third stage was crashed into the Moon, and the seismometers left by Apollo 12, 14, 15 and 16 recorded the impact. During the journey, the crew checked the light flashes previous astronauts had reported; these were later attributed to cosmic particles striking the retina. On the surface they deployed the rover, a heat-flow meter for the soil, a seismic station with explosive charges later detonated remotely from Houston, and an instrument to study the Moon's thin atmosphere. The rocks collected are between 3.5 and 4 billion years old, and Schmitt found tiny orange glass spheres of volcanic origin. The stay on the Moon lasted 3 days and 3 hours, with 22 hours and 4 minutes of surface exploration. Before lifting off, the astronauts read the plaque on the lunar module. On the way back, Evans went outside to retrieve material from the service module, and the mission ended on 19 December with splashdown in the Pacific.