On board were (left to right) Lunar Module Pilot Jim Irwin, Commander Dave Scott, and Command Module Pilot Al Worden
The landing site was Hadley-Appenine, on the edge of Mare Imbrium. It was bordered by Hadley Rille, a valley-like geological structure and the Montes Apenninus, or Appenine Mountains. The Palus Putredinus was a lava field that filled the area.
The Crew vehicles on the mission were CSM-11 Endeavour and LM-10 Falcon.
Apollo 15 was the first extended stay J-mission, remaining on the Moon for three days while Scott and Irwin performed three surface EVAs.
Apollo 15 was the first mission to use the Lunar Rover Vehicle, an electric two seat vehicle that was folded up and stored on the descent stage of the LM.
That's a taste. There is a lot to share about Apollo 15, one of my favorite missions. I hope you enjoy this week as much as I hope I do.
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The mission patch was based on a design from well known Italian fashion designer, Emilio Pucci. The design has three stylized birds flying over the Hadley-Appenine landing site with the crew names on the lower part of the outer border.
In an early version of an Easter egg, the crew snuck a Roman numeral XV into the crater shadows. According to a story I heard from one of Al Worden's @ExploreSpaceKSC presentations, NASA discouraged Roman numerals on the Apollo patches, thus the hidden nature.
Before his passing last year, @WordenAlfred was a regular astronaut host at @ExploreSpaceKSC giving presentations guiding tours and being an affable ambassador of the Apollo program to a new audience.
Today I’ll be working on some research for the big Mars exhibition! As I said yesterday, I’m working on researching how people have been imaging the Red Planet throughout history.
Today we have orbiters circling Mars and rovers that take pictures of the surface. But the history of imaging Mars stretches back centuries, from depicting Mars in art to the canals people thought they saw on the planet.
What are some of your favourite images of Mars and why?
Going to talk about designing a temporary display today!
In Science Museum lingo, there are 2 kinds of displays:
🚀Exhibitions (temporary displays) - these can last up to a year
🚀Galleries (permanent displays)
Even a temporary display might take several years to prepare for, with overviews and detailed proposals.
Exotic solvents & life's building blocks are among the more speculative #astrobiology topics, but still important to study scientifically! Our own system contains places potentially able to host life unlike on Earth. Not just Titan!
All Earth life is carbon-based and needs water to survive. 💦
'Mildly' exotic life might share these traits, but use e.g. other information molecule (or differently coded DNA, even with different/more 'letters') or opposite chirality (left/right-handedness) of some compounds.
There are countless possibilities of different information molecules and their coding. Is Earth DNA and RNA a ', frozen accident', or does it have a phys/chem reason? And is all life chiral? In the same way, or is that another frozen accident? What about the amino acids we use?
Though discovered already in the late 18th century by William Herschel, we had long known extremely little about it. 🔭
That changed with the Voyager flybys! 🛰️
This image was taken by Voyager 2 on August 25, 1981, from about 110,000 km away. It shows cratering, but also bright ice, grooves, some crater-poor areas. That suggested parts of the surface were very young - the tiny moon was active!
If you were to search for extra-terrestrial life in the Solar System and had a budget for let's say a medium-class/New Frontiers mission, where would you go? 🛰️
Not doing a poll; too many possible good answers!
For me, though, 🪐 moon Enceladus is (narrowly) the top choice.
There are other great options, of course!
Venus.
Mars.
Europa.
Titan.
Less likely other subsurface ocean-bearing moons or dwarf planets; we still know so little about them all!
Venus is great from the overall planetary science perspective. It's so frustrating that we still have little clue whether it had once possessed oceans, for how long, and when and how fast it changed into the current greenhouse hell!