More than four decades after it crash landed on the moon, the S-IVB third-stage rocket booster used on the Apollo 16 mission has been discovered by a Johns Hopkins University physicist, the researcher responsible for finding its impact crater confirmed over the weekend.
According to Inside Outer Space and Science Alert, Jeff Plescia, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, used the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high-resolution, three-camera LROC system to locate the long lost impact crater on the lunar surface.
“I did finally find the Apollo 16 SIVB crater,” Plescia told Leonard David of Inside Outer Space last week. He added that it “looks like the others, but its position was much more poorly defined since the tracking was lost prior to impact.”
Malfunction caused the booster’s tracking data to be lost
The Apollo 16 mission was the fifth in which the US space agency planned to send astronauts to the moon and bring them safely back to Earth. The booster rocket was intentionally crashed into the surface as part of an experiment designed to conduct seismic measurements and analyze the composition of the moon’s interior.
Due to a malfunction, however, the tracking data for the rocket was lost—meaning that for many years, NASA officials had no clue as to where it actually crash-landed. Now, thanks to Plescia’s work in reviewing images from the LRO satellite, the missing booster has been located.
Apollo 16 launched on April 16, 1972, and its S-IVB rocket was crashed into the moon three days later. The mission was the second-to-last in the Apollo program, and crew members were commander John Young, command module pilot Thomas Kenneth “Ken” Mattingly II, and lunar module pilot Charles Duke. In all, it lasted a total of 265 hours, 51 minutes, and five seconds.
Young and Duke, in the lunar module, landed in the Descartes Highlands region of the moon. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum said that the total lunar surface activities of the Apollo 16 crew lasted 20 hours 14 minutes, that 95 kilograms worth of rock samples were collected, and that the LRV traveled a total distance of 26.7 kilometers.
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Feature Image: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
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