FOR several chilling minutes last week, millions of television viewers wondered if Astronauts Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Al Worden were going to make it safety back to earth. As the command module Endeavour came into sight high above the fluffy clouds over the Pacific, it became apparent that one of its three big orange-and-white chutes was fouled and thus not supporting its share of the load. Dropping into the calm seas 300 miles north of Hawaii several feet per second faster than planned, the moonship created a mighty splash. But despite the jolting landing the astronauts were safely home. Man's fourth and most productive moon-landing mission had ended successfully.
Few fictional adventures could rival the real-life drama of Apollo 15—or match its superlatives. During their twelve-day mission, the Apollo crewmen roamed the moon for more than 17 hours, almost as long as did the Apollo 11, 12 and 14 astronauts combined. They traveled 17.5 miles in the first car man has ever driven on the moon, took the first walk in deep space, and returned with a record-breaking haul of more than 170 lbs. of lunar rocks. But the really significant accomplishment of Apollo 15 was its scientific payoff, which in the words of Paul Cast, chief of lunar and planetary science at the Manned Spacecraft Center, will enable man to take "a real giant step in the understanding of the solar system."
Perhaps the most important discovery was made early in the week during the second excursion by Astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin. After driving past a group of craters called the South Cluster, they made their way up a 7° slope toward the mountainous Apennine Front, and approached an imposing 12,000-ft. peak called Hadley Delta. The astronauts stepped out of the rover and began to select rocks, describing each to the fascinated geologists back in the science support room in Houston. One rock looked like "green cheese"—until Scott raised his gold-tinted visor and saw that it was really gray.
Elusive Fragment. Suddenly, Scott exclaimed: "Guess what we just found!" His prize was a rock made up of large crystals; to scientists his description indicated that it had once been molten and had cooled slowly, probably far below the surface. "The Holy Grail," proclaimed NASA Geochemist Robin Brett, who, like Scott, immediately concluded that the specimen could well be an elusive fragment of the moon's original crust. The crystalline rock, the first large one of its kind found by astronauts, may well give scientists a new slant on the early history of the 4.6 billion-year-old moon. It may also expand man's knowledge of the primordial earth, where wind, water and crustal movements apparently obliterated all rocks older than about 3.4 billion years. The prized rock, Scott reported later in a televised press conference from space, was found on top of a larger brown rock—"sitting there like it was waiting for us."