Apollo 16
Apollo 16 landed in April 1972 as the first mission to the lunar highlands — the Descartes region. Young, Mattingly and Duke explored the plateau by rover, a region scientists had wrongly believed to be volcanic.
◉ REÁLNÉ FOTO · NASA / images.nasa.govContents
living encyclopedia entrypollo 16 headed into the unknown — the bright Descartes highlands, which geologists thought were volcanic. The samples instead revealed impact breccias, rewriting ideas about how the lunar surface evolved.
A veteran of Gemini 3 (1965), Gemini 10 (1966) and Apollo 10 (1969). On Apollo 16 he became the second American after James Lovell to fly in space four times. He later commanded the first Space Shuttle flight (STS-1, 1981).
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Three days before Apollo 13’s launch he was replaced by a backup after exposure to rubella — he never got sick. On Apollo 16 he performed the second deep-space spacewalk in history. He later commanded two Space Shuttle missions.
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A former CAPCOM during the Apollo 11 landing. At 36 he became the tenth person on the Moon and remains, to this day, the youngest person ever to have stood on its surface.
open person →John Young and Charles Duke spent three days on the surface and drove over 26 km. Young performed a “lunar grand prix” for the camera, and Duke left a family photograph on the Moon. Ken Mattingly, bumped from Apollo 13 over a suspected measles exposure, finally orbited the Moon.
Command module pilot Ken Mattingly had originally been slated to fly on Apollo 13 — three days before launch he was replaced by…
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Just before the modules were due to separate, Mattingly detected oscillations in the backup steering of the CSM’s main engine.…
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While Young and Duke were on the surface, Mattingly orbited the Moon 64 times in the Casper module and, as the first command…
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MISSION IN NUMBERS
- Ken Mattingly was originally slated for Apollo 13, but was replaced three days before launch after exposure to rubella — he never actually got sick.
- The landing was nearly scrubbed because of a fault in the main engine’s backup steering — Mission Control cleared it only after several hours of analysis.
- At 36, Charles Duke became the youngest person ever to stand on the surface of the Moon — a record that still stands.
- Samples from the boulder “House Rock” conclusively disproved the theory that the Descartes highlands were formed by volcanic activity.
- The crew brought back “Big Muley” — the largest single rock collected during the entire Apollo program.
- On the way home, Mattingly performed only the second deep-space spacewalk in history, more than 300,000 km from the nearest celestial body.
