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Paper Fender. At the start of their second moon walk, the astronauts headed straight for the damaged rover. Displaying a little old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity. Mission Control had advised them to tape together four lunar maps made of stiff photographic paper and attach the resulting 15-by 20-in. rectangle to the damaged fender with clamps taken from Challenger's interior light fixtures. The scheme worked. Indeed, the paper fender was so effective that it shielded the astronauts from dust even when Cernan opened the rover's throttle to more than 7 m.p.h. on the way to South Massif, about four miles away. "Whoooaa, let's slow the speed up," Schmitt pleaded as the car narrowly missed dipping into one steep little crater. Cernan, however, showed a sure hand at the controls. "You can uncurl your toes now," he told Schmitt as they approached their destination, still intact.
Schmitt seemed none too steady as he began his sampling, tumbling twice and muttering "Dadgummit" as he struggled to rise. But his chagrin turned to excitement near a crater named Shorty (after a character in Richard Brautigan's novel Trout Fishing in America). Suddenly, as his space boots scuffed some of the gray topsoil from the crater's rim, he exclaimed: "Hey, there is orange soil. It's all over." Chugging toward him, Cernan shouted: "Well, don't move until I see it!" The astronauts' enthusiasm on the moon was shared by scientists watching in Mission Control's "back room." Caltech's Gerald Wasserburg jumped up from his fourth-row seat and practically pressed his nose against the TV screen to see the coloring for himself. NASA'S Egyptian-born geologist Farouk El Baz, who had helped train the astronauts, beamed proudly. Even the space agency's cautious Australian-born Geochemist Robin Brett exulted: "We have witnessed one of the important finds in Apollo geology."
There was good reason for the excitement. The orange hue indicated that the lunar material may have oxidized, or rusted. That, in turn, meant that it had probably been exposed to water or oxygen. The only likely source for such vapors on the arid, airless moon were volcanic vents in the lunar surface. Indeed, some scientists had suspected earlier that Shorty Crater (which resembles volcanic vents on earth) had been created volcanically rather than by the impact of a meteorite (which is how most of the moon's craters are believed to have been formed). As they await the precious samples of orange soil, some scientists are now speculating that Shorty may in fact be no more than 200,000 or 300,000 years old. That would suggest surprisingly recent volcanic activity on the moon, which was believed to have been largely dormant for the past three billion years.