Post-EVA-1 Activities

Preparations for EVA-2

 

EVA-2 Wake-up

Corrected Transcript and Commentary Copyright © 1995 by Eric M. Jones.
All rights reserved.
Scan credits in the Image Library.
Audio clips by Dave Shaffer.
Last revised 20 May 2014.

MP3 Audio Clip ( 14 min 11 sec )

136:55:05 (Music: "Ride of the Valkyries" by Richard Wagner)

[Jack Schmitt (Dabney '57) and Gordon Fullerton (Fleming '57) were both undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology. At 7:00 a.m. on the mornings of Caltech final examinations, it was traditional for students with hi-fi systems to tie them together and wake up everybody in the undergraduate dorms by playing "The Ride" at full volume. For those - including your editor (Blacker '66) - who have been through the experience, the sound always gets the blood pumping no matter how little sleep they've had the night before.]

136:56:43 Schmitt: Sounded like Parker had the duty (of picking the wake-up music). Both monumental and epic.

[Bob Parker was a married graduate student at Caltech and lived off-campus. Playing "The Ride" was strictly an undergraduate phenomenon and, for Bob, the Ride wouldn't have had the same significance as it did for Jack. In a February 1992 telephone conversation, Bob said that, if it was he who picked the piece, it was simply because he likes Wagner and can think of few things more stirring than the Ride. He also says that, in the Apollo era, the wake-up music was usually picked the night before and that they sometimes had trouble finding a recording in time.]

[In a separate telephone conversation, Fullerton said that he is certain that the idea of playing the Ride was not his. He noted that there were plenty of Caltech people around and that any one of them might have come up with the idea.]

[Journal Contributor Danny Ross Lunsford tells us that the tune Jack is humming is from the third movement of Chopin's 2nd piano sonata in B-flat minor, op. 35.]

136:57:49 Schmitt: Well, it's nice to have rested some.

136:57:55 Fullerton: Rog. I'm sure of that. (Long Pause)

[Schmitt - "I wore the ear-piece every night because I was closer to the panel. The usable volume of the cabin is T-shaped. My hammock was stretched across the front, and Gene was stretched out toward the back, over the engine cover, with the suits under him."]

136:58:16 Fullerton: They look good, as expected. Right on.

[Comm Break. They are on Surface 3-8. According to the checklist, the crew has 25 minutes for "Post-sleep" activities. Those that are called out are stowing the hammocks and sleep restraints getting a stay/no stay decision from Houston, reporting on their sleep and meals, and copying lift-off times for the next several hours. Needless to say, they are also taking time to urinate and perform other personal and housekeeping chores before having breakfast and getting into their Liquid Cooled Garments and suits. Because they were on a low residue diet, neither of them had to defecate while they were on the Moon.]

137:00:32 Schmitt: (Unintentional key) Stow your sleep restraint up there? (Pause) I mean, your hammock. (Pause) Either way. I'll stuff all mine in this compartment here, if you'll just get yours in there. Otherwise, we can rearrange it. See how it looks first.

[Schmitt - "We were very careful to keep things stowed in the place to which they were assigned. We had many storage training sessions. During the mission, I would have known where everything was stowed but, now, I can't remember anything except that there were a lot of soft fabric bags in the back portion of the usable volume of the ascent stage, along the walls as I recall. Actually, I take it back. I don't think they were soft; there were some soft containers, but I think they all had aluminum latch covers on them. But anyway, we had a place for everything and we made sure it went back into that place. Otherwise, it would have been chaotic. We tried not to have a lot of stuff out at one time." ]

[Cernan - "Because of weight restrictions, I don't think we had aluminum covers on all of the storage compartments and, rather, a lot of our stowage areas had net coverings on them. Although we were going to be on the Moon for three days, we always had to keep things well stowed in case we had an emergency lift-off." ]

[Comm Break]

137:02:02 Fullerton: Roger, Jack. (Long Pause)

[That is, Jack only heard comm noise once during the rest period.]

[Comm Break.]

137:04:41 Fullerton: You're Stay. Never any doubt.

137:04:46 Schmitt: Thank you, sir. (Long Pause)

137:05:45 Schmitt: (Unintentional key, preparing to give Fullerton a Crew Status report) (Garbled) have any medication? (Pause) (Garbled) report the food. (Pause)

137:06:04 Schmitt: Okay, Gordy. Status report is excellent. No medication for either one of us. CDR slept 6 hours pretty good; I slept 6 hours intermittent, but generally good.

137:06:21 Fullerton: Okay, Jack.

137:06:25 Schmitt: And we've eaten well, I think. The food's a little bit confused since we had our little minor explosion in the cabin, but I think you could say it's good. We've had a lot to drink, a lot of juices. We ate the frankfurters. We're sharing a lot of the stuff because it's not symmetrically packed. If you want more details, it will take time. (Long Pause) And, Gordy, we did not eat the corn chowder.

[The "explosion" was apparently caused by a slight expansion of the food bags which, when Gene and Jack opened the stowage compartment, popped out and got very disorganized. There was a prior mention of corn chowder at 115:50:24 and, in both that instance and this one, they are referring back to episodes of flatulence on the trip out from Earth which they blamed on the chowder.]

137:07:29 Schmitt: Yeah, we got just about everything else. We go into...maybe mixed up two meals, but essentially meal B and C for yesterday were eaten, except for the corn chowder.

137:07:51 Fullerton: Okay, Jack. (We) copy. (Pause)

[NASA photo KSC-72P-536 was taken on December 4, two days before the scheduled launch, and shows Gene, Jack, and Ron making a final examination of the food packed for the mission under the watchful eye of dietician Rita Rapp (right), who headed the Apollo food program. Dave Ballard, Apollo 17 Flight Crew Support Team Leader, adds " This was the last crew equipment review prior to final stowage in the Command Module. The crew is looking at a food locker with Rita graciously overseeing the results of her able efforts. Left to right: Gene; Jack; a KSC Quality Control troop, name unknown; Bob Horne, Crew Equipment Engineer from our support team; Ron; and Rita."]

137:08:30 Schmitt: Stand by, Gordy. That may be difficult. (Pause) Yeah, we'll get the PRD a little bit later when we start suiting up.

[Cernan - "I'm pretty sure that, while we slept, we each kept our PRDs in a pocket in our LCG and then, when we got suited, we'd put it in a pocket in the suit itself." ]

[The checklist calls for PRD readings after they've got their LCGs and suits on but before they don the PLSSs. There are no mentions of any PRD transfers in the checklist.]

137:08:50 Cernan: Hey, Gordy, on this water. We saturated ourselves before we went out. I finished my drink bag out in the suit on the surface. Jack finished about better than three-quarters of his. We've had water and tea and then the juice, and we have been drinking water constantly, post-EVA. And to give you a quantity is almost impossible.

137:09:17 Fullerton: Okay; that's fine.

137:09:24 Schmitt: If the water's down, it's probably because we've been drinking it. And I'm ready for your lift-off PAD data.

[These lift-off times will be needed by the computer if they have to launch early. In the following list, the first lift-off time is for Command Module orbit 26. The start of each orbit comes roughly at the point over the middle of the lunar Farside at which the crew did the engine burn that first put them into lunar orbit. ]

[Cernan - "The PADs were pre-printed forms at appropriate places in the flight plan with labeled boxes where you would write things like these updated lift-off times."]

[Fullerton carefully pronounced each digit, and using "niner" rather than "nine" in his recitation. Jack does not follow suit.]

137:10:39 Fullerton: That's affirm.

137:10:46 Schmitt: (Reading quickly) Okay. Rev 26 is 138:40:15; 140:38:49; 142:37:22; 144:35:55; 146:34:29; 148:33:03; 150:31:37. And what's our present rev?

137:11:13 Fullerton: Okay; I'll have to check that myself. (Pause) We're on rev 25. He (Ron Evans)'s about three-quarters of the way across the front side. Coming up back side will start 26.

137:11:40 Schmitt: Okey-doke.

137:11:41 Fullerton: And, for your information, he's running the VHF Sounder, and it's working fine.

137:11:52 Schmitt: That's good to hear.

137:11:54 Cernan: By the way, good morning, Gordy.

137:11:56 Fullerton: Good morning, Commander.

137:12:01 Cernan: How does America itself look?

137:12:03 Fullerton: Just as good as ever. Ahead on the consumables.

[Evans is using less oxygen, water, maneuvering fuel, etc. than planned.]

137:12:23 Cernan: Okay. And I guess from...I didn't hear your comment, but I assume Challenger's the same way.

137:12:29 Fullerton: That's affirm. That's the way it looks here, anyway. (Long Pause)

[Cernan - "People sometimes ask if I worried about getting home. Well, you're sitting there inside an oil can and you've already bitten the bullet. If something's going to happen there's nothing you can do about it. So why worry about getting back until the end of the three days when it's going to count."]

137:13:43 Cernan: Okay, Gordy. Will do.

[Comm Break]

137:15:47 Fullerton: No. That's not the problem, Jack. I think our concern was more that you were taking enough onboard internally. (Long Pause)

[Fullerton is struggling as he tries to say what he means.]

137:16:10 Fullerton: That's right. That you were drinking enough. That's what we were worried about.

MP3 Audio Clip ( 13 min 03 sec )

137:16:20 Schmitt: Okay; we'll keep pushing it!

[Comm Break with occasional accidental keys]

[Schmitt - "There was a tendency to be dehydrated and also a tendency not to be either thirsty or hungry - at least in the first few days - so I made a point to force myself to drink and eat. More so than I think either Gene or Ron. Gene didn't eat much the first few days. And neither did Ron." ]

[Cernan - "I lost weight on all three of my missions: thirteen pounds on Gemini IX, eight on Apollo 10, and eleven on Apollo 17. (Evans and Schmitt each lost about five pounds during the mission.) Food was a necessity more than an enjoyment. You just didn't get hungry, the food wasn't that great, and you just didn't eat as much as you normally would. I don't remember whether I ate a lot or not; but, having flown before, I was certainly very aware of the need to continually drink as much water as we could."]

[Schmitt - "Some of these accidental keys may have been caused by pushing the talk button out of habit." ]

[Comm Break]

137:19:15 Fullerton: Okay; let me round up John Young. He stepped out for a second. We'll have him here in a minute. Might as well let the resident expert on fenders talk. (Long Pause)

137:19:55 Fullerton: Okay; I'll now turn the microphone over to Captain Young.

[Schmitt - "John Young was involved in this not only because he was the backup Commander but also because he had broken a fender on his Rover on Apollo 16 and knew how important the problem was. Without the fender, you get a forward rooster tail and you end up driving into your own dust."]

[Ron Creel has provided a summary ( 1.3 Mb PDF ) of the fender extension losses that occurred on all three Rover missions.]

137:20:08 Cernan: Hello, John. How you doing?

137:20:11 Young: Oh, just fine. You guys are doing a superb job; really beautiful. Hey, we spent some time on this fender problem and worked out a pretty simple-minded procedure, which involves essentially taking four of those cronopaque pages out of your lunar surface maps - ones which are not going to be used for discussing the site - taping them together with gray tape so that you end up with a piece of paper about 15 inches by 10-1/2 inches, and then using the AOT (Alignment Optical Telescope) lamp clamps, pre-position them full opened, taking them out (in the ETB), taking that piece of paper out (of the ETB), laying it on top of the fender guide rails, and clamping the edges of it with the AOT lamp clamps. It's simple and straightforward, and the beauty of it is you're only spending about 2 minutes in the clamping operation, and it could save you up to about 12 (minutes of) dusting, I think maybe. (Pause) What do you think?

[Gene and Jack have a set of lunar surface maps which are printed on a stiff, photographic paper called "cronopaque". Each map is about 8 by 10 inches. The front of each sheet is a photographic map while the back is a contour map to aid in crater identification. Gene discusses the AOT lamp clamps below. They can be seen just to the right of Jack's right hand in training photo KSC-72PC-540.]

[Schmitt - "We had maps to cover the whole area in case we ended up with an 'off nominal' landing, as NASA would say, and had to run traverses different from the ones we planned. So there were a bunch of spare maps and that's what they decided to have us tape together to form the replacement fender."]

137:22:01 Young: You just take four pages and allow...Well, I've got the detailed procedures here, if you're ready to copy. Over.

137:22:11 Cernan: Well, no. I'm not ready to copy yet, but what do you do? Tape the four squares into a bigger square about 16 by 20.

137:22:18 Young: Yeah. Allow about an inch of overlap, and tape both sides of them.

137:22:24 Cernan: Okay.

137:22:27 Young: And then you get the AOT clamps off the utility lights and open the clamp jaws to max. And you stow the clamps, and you roll up the paper...Roll up the...Roll up your fender shortwise and put a gray (tape) tab over that and stow it in the ETB. You got both the clamps and the paper fender in the ETB.

[Cernan - "We had a couple of auxiliary lights which were little spotlights with clamps on the back that you could fasten anywhere: on a circuit breaker panel, on a rod. They were very useful, and I think we even brought the clamps back in with us after the third EVA to make sure we had them. They were called the AOT lamp clamps because, most of the time, we had them clamped to the bars on the cage surrounding the sextant or Alignment Optical Telescope. As the cabin pictures show, the AOT was between us at about head height, on the front bulkhead between the windows."]

[There is a picture of the fender, as installed, at the start of the drive out to Station 2. It is frame AS17-135- 20542.]

137:23:48 Young: Yeah, on the inboard one. On the outboard one, if you put it a little further back aft on the wheel, it allows you to give your paper fender a little more rigidity.

137:24:10 Cernan: And you just say lay them over the guide rails (and) sort of...so the clamps are also over the guide rails. And not try and align the makeshift fender in the guide rails itself, huh?

[Schmitt - "The guide rails were about as thick as a pencil and you could use them as something to clamp this new fender on so that it wouldn't move."]

[Schmitt - "Gene has a naturally strong grip. He has very big hands and that's what John's referring to."]

137:25:01 Young: Roger. One of the things - when you're taping the pages together - that you want to be careful of is that you make sure and get the air bubbles out so when you get in the vacuum, it doesn't open up by itself. And maybe you can put an X across there to make sure that, if you get any separation, it's still held together pretty good. We think the tape will work because back about in (Apollo) 13, we were using it just sort of incidentally in the thermal vacuum chamber, and it worked okay there for some reason.

[Young had been the backup Commander on Apollo 13.]

137:25:54 Young: Yeah, I agree.

137:25:59 Cernan: As far as how much of the new fender to overlap on the present fender, just make it about symmetrical with the other side (that is, the undamaged, left-rear fender), and that probably ought to give me plenty of overlap, huh?

137:26:10 Young: Well, are you talking about over the dovetail part of it, or are you talking about off the aft end of the vehicle?

137:26:24 Cernan: I'm talking about the present fender that's on there, the aft end of that fender. About how much overlap do you want with this makeshift fender? Just give me an idea. I think I could figure out when I get there, but I'd rather have your feelings before I do.

[The missing piece is the aft half of the right-rear fender.]

137:27:18 Cernan: Yeah, (garbled). That would be about 4 or 5 inches. Great.

137:27:22 Young: Yes, it's just sort of like a horizontal fender, like on an old automobile.

137:27:33 Schmitt: (To Gene) I thought I understood what he was talking about. Pipe. (Pause)

137:27:39 Young: Say again, Geno.

137:27:45 Schmitt: Hey, John. This is Jack. Did you say "pipe" there a minute ago? P-i-p-e?

137:27:56 Young: Yeah, but it doesn't roll up into a circle; it's sort of a...a hemisphere. I mean it's half of one.

[Young is trying to describe a cylinder sliced lengthwise.]

137:28:14 Young: You know the problem I have with communications.

[Andrew Chaikin suspects that this is a sly reference to an incident during Apollo 16 when, not realizing that he had an open mike to Houston, Young talked freely and frankly - and with a lot of cursing - about the trouble they were having with orange drink, which was getting in their hair and microphones and was making John suffer from incessent flatulence.]

[Schmitt - "As I recall, I think I was just standing there, admiring the ingenuity of the support crew. The guys on the ground had gone out and thought about everything we had in the spacecraft, looked at the inventory, and then, as a team, tried to figure out what in the world we could do to solve the problem using what we had. I don't remember ever even thinking about a solution once they said the previous night that they were going to work on it. I figured they would work something out."]

[Schmitt - "Terry Neal was a member of our support team. A real young guy. I introduced him to his wife - something to do with a blind date I couldn't make and he was the substitute and eventually married the girl. He was one of the ones responsible for storage of equipment in the LM and for generating the lunar surface operations plans and stuff like that." ]

[In a January 1992 telephone conversation, Neal said that he and Ron Blevins - one of the training instructors - were called in to work on the fender problem. They went through the list of materials available in the LM and, having decided on the maps and the clamps, fashioned a fender, and showed it to Young. Neal remembers that Young then took the fender to the Control Room so that the Flight Director and others could examine it. (See NASA photo S72- 55170.) Neal, himself, then went home to get some sleep. As Fullerton indicated at 137:13:15, Young subsequently got into a suit and put the fender on a training Rover to make sure that there wouldn't be any problems with the installation. ]

[A fuller account can be found after 126:15:46.]

[As an aside, Neal also says that, in the blind-date story, Jack has mixed together two sets of memories. At some point during Apollo, Jack had a date with the daughter of a friend of Al Shepard's and, when a schedule conflict arose, Neal was a last minute substitute. Separately, Neal's future wife, Mary, worked at the Cape in the Crew Operations area and knew Jack in that context. The Neals' courtship did not begin until after she left Florida for Houston, long after the date switch.]

137:29:05 Young: We tried that. They just don't have the push.

137:29:13 Cernan: Sounds good, babe; appreciate it.

137:29:20 Young: Okay. We've got a detailed procedure here if you want to copy it; just in case.

137:29:36 Cernan: Yeah. Stand by one, though.

137:29:39 Young: Okay. (Pause)

137:29:44 Cernan: Hey, you know, after thinking and looking at some maps last night, and recalling what I saw during landing and where I was planning on putting it down and everything: I still think, to the best of my knowledge, that we are about 1 or 2 o'clock (relative to the down-Sun direction), and I'll increase up to about 200 meters or so west and slightly north of Poppie.

137:30:23 Fullerton: Okay, Geno. (Long Pause)

137:30:56 Cernan: Hey, Gordy, the thing that fooled me yesterday is this depression out at 9 o'clock here, which is greatly undersized for Trident - really isn't Trident - and I said yesterday, I didn't think how we could be that close. Well, we really aren't. Trident is way out there, and I'll still hold to my 200 meters at 1 to 2 o'clock of Poppie.

[They hadn't hit any good landmarks during EVA-1 which, given readouts from the Rover navigation system, would have let the people in the back room get an exact fix on the LM. Gene still doesn't realize that the crater 100 meters south of the spacecraft is Poppie. ]

[Schmitt - "Gene was more worried about this than I was. We knew where we were close enough for all of our planned EVA activities, so I quit worrying about where he actually landed." ]

[Cernan - "Whether or not you're interested in where you landed is a difference between a pilot and a geologist. For me, as a pilot, I wanted to know exactly where we landed, mostly as a matter of pride. For Jack, what mattered was that we'd landed in a geologist's paradise and, no matter where we were exactly, we couldn't lose."]

137:31:42 Cernan: Yeah, we may have coming back. I think I went all the way around to the east of the last one going out, though.

137:31:50 Fullerton: Okay. (Long Pause)

[Gene and Jack were actually well east of the Trident craters on both the outbound and inbound legs of the Station 1 traverse. Following Gene's lead, Houston thinks they are about 100 meters south and 200 meters west of the actual landing spot.]

137:32:20 Fullerton: Roger. (Long Pause)

137:33:00 Cernan: Besides, Gordy, when you land on a boat (aircraft carrier), all you're worried about is that the boat's there. You let the captain worry about where it (the carrier) is.

137:33:10 Fullerton: Rog.

[Comm Break. Gene is a former Naval Aviator; Fullerton flew for the Air Force.]

137:34:51 Cernan: Gordy, while we're eating, have you got a short synopsis of the news?

[Schmitt - "I was always interested in the news, particularly about Truman. He had gone into the hospital while we were on the way out; and I guess he died on the way back."]

[Gene occupies the left "seat" and Houston is asking to look at his biomedical telemetry.]

137:35:25 Fullerton: Okay.

137:35:30 Cernan: You have to wait until I start putting my suit on. (Long Pause)

137:35:45 Fullerton: Okay. As you might have expected, front pages around the country are headlining last night's EVA with photographs taken from TV monitors showing you and Jack going about your tasks. I might add that the TV camera is really spectacular. It couldn't have been a clearer or more beautiful picture, both for fidelity and color. (Pause)

137:36:08 Fullerton: In other news, South Vietnam's President Thieu has suggested that all prisoners of war be released before Christmas. He has also asked that all Vietnamese parties be included in peace negotiations. South Vietnam and the Viet Cong are now not directly represented in the secret talks now under way in Paris (between North Vietnam and the United States). Meanwhile, (U.S. Secretary of State Henry) Kissinger met for more than 4 hours yesterday with Hanoi representative Le Duc Tho. The two negotiators are expected to meet again this afternoon.

137:36:38 Fullerton: The former President, Harry Truman, is still resting quietly, although his condition remains serious according to his doctors. American poet Mark van Doren died at the age of 78. He was a professor of literature at Columbia and a winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for his poetry. President Nixon announced yesterday that he wants to extend wage/price controls beyond the scheduled April 30 expiration date. He also plans to freeze new hiring, promotions, and pay increases for executives of the Federal Government, which doesn't affect us, I guess. (Pause) The Republican National Committee has a new chairman...

137:37:29 Schmitt: How about me?

137:37:33 Fullerton: ...George Bush of Houston, who is now Ambassador to the United Nations. He will continue his UN post through the present session of the General Assembly. Both national political parties are now headed by Texans. As you recall, Robert Strauss of Dallas became Chairman of the Democratic National Committee last Saturday.

[This is George H.W. Bush, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 1971 to 1973 and Chairman of the Republican National Committee ifrom 1972 to 1974. After stints as head of the U.S. Liason Office in the People's Republic of China and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he was Vice President in the Reagan Administration from 1981 to 1989 and was elected President in his own right in 1988. His son, George H.W. Bush, was elected U.S. President in 2000.]

137:38:06 Schmitt: Can it talk? (Pause)

[Jack had spent quite a bit of time during the trip outbound to the Moon looking back at Earth and providing weather reports for the people stuck indoors at Mission Control.]

137:39:10 Cernan: Holy Smoley! That doesn't sound too good on the weather. I'm going to take a look, right here up the overhead window. (Long Pause)

[This is a small window over Cernan's position on the left side of the LM - the "rendezvous port" which he will use to watch his position relative to the Command Module during the final approach as they return to lunar orbit. From their position at the landing site, Earth is also visible out the front windows, but it is high enough in the local sky that Gene probably would have to bend down to see it.]

[Journal Contributor Frank O'Brien notes that the average December daytime high temperature is 53 degrees Fahrenheit.]

137:40:35 Fullerton: Rog.

[Cernan - "Things like this little weather report still seem unbelievable. It's amazing to think that somebody was actually up there on the Moon, looking back at Earth and telling people in Houston about their weather. And it was me that was doing it. Unbelievable!"]

137:40:48 Fullerton: Roger.

137:40:54 Cernan: And (at) Taurus-Littrow, the weather's great.

[Long Comm Break. During a preliminary, unrecorded discussion about the mission, Jack remembered how bright the Australian deserts were when they were sunlit. He said he hadn't been conscious of the Earth as a clock but did notice what was visible.]

[Cernan - "I was very conscious of the rotation of the Earth while we were on the Moon. If you gave yourself enough time, you could watch it rotate. It didn't have any strings holding it up; it didn't have any fulcrum like a globe spinning on your desk; but you could watch it rotate hour after hour. You could slowly watch certain continents disappear; and you'd realize that you were looking at something new and strange, and yet familiar. Even though so much of it was cloud- or snow-covered, you could still pick out enough of where the blues were to know where the continents were and therefore detect a shape, with the naked eye, from the Moon. And you'd realize that new continents were coming into view. You couldn't sit there and watch it; that would have been like watching water boil. But, literally, over a period of hours - say the eight hours between when we got out of the spacecraft and when we got back in - the Earth rotated a third of the way around."]

137:44:08 Fullerton: Go ahead.

137:44:14 Schmitt: Roger. Gordy, how's the ALSEP doing? And, in that light, I hope you people will take as close a look as you can at the signal strength and its variation and see if you get some idea whether, when I go after the neutron flux tomorrow, if I ought to work on that antenna alignment again. I'm still a little bit concerned about it.

137:44:40 Fullerton: Okay, Jack. We'll consider that; although, they've been getting good performance out of the Central Station, as I understand. A couple of problems with the experiments. One was the LEAM data isn't synching up like it should. I'll have to get a further, more complete story on that. And we're thinking that's...

137:45:08 Schmitt: I'm joking!

137:45:09 Fullerton: ...mostly a ground (meaning Houston) software problem. The other one is the LSG isn't leveling up properly. We'll cover this further in the planning briefing for the EVA here; but we're probably going to let you off...I mean, have Geno let Jack off (of the Rover) at the ALSEP and take another look at the leveling on the LSG. That'll be at the end of the EVA.

[Schmitt - "The Lunar Surface Gravimeter (LSG) was a very-long-period seismometer which was basically a gravimeter. The Principle Investigator was Professor (Joseph) Weber at the University of Maryland, and its basic purpose was to monitor the free oscillation frequencies of the Moon, hoping that, when a gravity wave went past, it would excite both the Moon and the Earth simultaneously, and therein would lie proof of the existence of gravity waves. If it had worked and if they had indeed seen a gravity wave go by, it clearly would have been a Nobel Prize class experiment - probably the only one that ever flew on Apollo in that weird environment of Nobel Prizes. Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, the balance beam had a one-tenth-gram error in its design - right from the very beginning. And you might ask why wasn't it tested. And the answer is that it wasn't tested - to see if it would uncage in one-sixth gravity - because the subcontractor had claimed that such a test would reveal some kind of proprietary information about their gravimeter. And NASA let them get away with that! I heard about that when we did our last deployment of the flight hardware down in a big hanger in the Air Force launch area near the Kennedy Space Center; and I pushed them after that deployment to do a test - which you clearly could do, just by tilting the gravimeter, and making sure it would uncage - and they insisted that they didn't need to do that. And I didn't push it and I should have; I blame myself more than anybody. Then, when we got to the Moon and I leveled it and did everything I was supposed to, it didn't uncage properly; and, as we go through EVA-2 and, I think, even EVA-3, I will keep going back there to try things they'd thought of to make it uncage. They didn't figure out until much later - post-mission - that a design error was what was wrong. They kept saying that there was something wrong with the deployment. My gut tells me it used up two hours of EVA time." ]

[The total extra time spent at the LSG was about a half hour, still a significant amount of time. The important point, of course, is that the instrument didn't work as planned. According to the Apollo Program Summary Report (JSC-09423, April 1975), "review of sensor records revealed that an error in arithmetic resulted in the sensor masses being approximately 2 percent lighter than the proper nominal weight for one-sixth-earth-gravity operation of the flight unit. The sensor mechanism allows a (plus or minus) 1.5 percent adjustment by ground command to correct mass inaccuracies." In a November 5, 1991 conversation and in a follow-up letter, Weber stated that the source of the uncaging error was not a design error but an arithmetic error made during the manufacture of the balance beam by the subcontractor, LaCoste and Romberg. Lacking any definitive NASA documentation on the matter, I am inclined to take Jack at his word and conclude that there was a design error. However, no matter whether the arithmetic error was made by the designer or the manufacturer, the lesson of the LSG experience is that, to the extent possible, every piece of flight hardware should be thoroughly tested before launch.]

137:46:07 Fullerton: Let's make sure we've got all our problems solved down here before you do that.

137:46:14 Schmitt: Okay. Hey, (West?) Family Mountain - the northeast facing slope - although lower, has boulders and outcrops...I mean. Belay the "outcrop".

137:46:32 Schmitt: (Starting the thought again) It has boulders. From (the appearance of the various) local block concentrations, (it) looks very much like the South Massif does.

137:46:39 Fullerton: Roger (Long Pause)

[Schmitt - "I got my mouth in motion before my mind. It's not good grammar; but it's the way we talked."]

137:48:33 Schmitt: (Unintentional key) I've about had it, I think.

137:48:38 Cernan: (Garbled) chocolate.

137:48:42 Schmitt: No, I've had two.

[Comm Break]

137:51:19 Fullerton: Okay. Copy that.

[Journal Contributor Ulli Lotzmann notes that the 10x40 monocular was manufactured by Leitz, Germany, and modified by NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) Houston.]

137:51:49 Fullerton: Roger, Jack.

[Schmitt - "Anorthosite is a rock made up primarily of a calcium-aluminum silicate mineral called anorthite, a kind of feldspar. The sixty-kilometer-thick crust of the Moon appears to be largely anorthosite with olivine and pyroxene mixed up with it; and most of the light-colored places of the Moon that you see from Earth are this crust exposed. Although the outcrops on the Massifs look like anorthosites from the LM, it turns out that, after we looked at the rocks that had rolled down, these blue-gray rocks were blue-gray breccias. They were rocks composed of fragments of other rocks, some of those fragments being anorthosite. We weren't expecting to see whole anorthosites on the Massifs because the Massif rocks were almost certainly (shocked) material which had been thrown out of the Serenitatis Basin, so we weren't quite sure what we would see: big breccias or big chunks of anorthosite. It might have been either. The important observation from the LM was that the exposed rocks on the Massif looked fairly distinctly blue-gray and, later on when we got over there, indeed, the rocks were blue-gray. They were breccias but some of the chunks in them were anorthosite and others were dunite. Dunite is a rock composed largely of the mineral olivine, and one of those that we sampled was - and still is, I think - the oldest rock ever dated from the Moon at 4.6 billion, plus or minus 0.1 billion. And all of that happened over at Station 2 on this second EVA."]

137:52:56 Fullerton: Okay, Geno, we...(Pause) Standby one. (Pause)

[In the pictures that Gene took from his window shortly after the landing (especially AS17-147- 22482), the gap in the Camelot rim begins above Geophone Rock and extends about ten percent of the picture width to the left. Prior to the mission, researchers at Bell Laboratories used contour maps of the site to generate expected views of the Scarp from the LM and from points along the planned outbound EVA-2 traverse. The results of that study were reported in an October 12, 1972 memo by H. F. Cooper. The expected view from the LM did not include obscuration by the Camelot rim.]

[Schmitt - "We started naming lunar features on Apollo 8. Bill Anders decided that it would be far easier to remember names than numbers or letters or anything like that, particularly for the pilots who were used to call signs. So I suggested that we start naming the craters on the Farside - the ones that didn't already have names - that were going to be useful in the navigation and landmark sighting exercises. And before we were through we had named an awful lot of craters - for people in the space program and God-knows what else. Some of them were rejected by the international commission (a nomenclature commission of the International Astronomical Union) that deals in naming features on other planets and some of them were ultimately accepted. Then I did the same thing for the Apollo 10 crew when they did their lunar orbit activities. And then all the crews started to get into it, and most of them did their own naming after that, I think. For our mission, I came up with most of the names for the landing site features and Gene added a few. Poppie and Punk were two of his. Again, the international commission accepted most of names we picked but, for example, the name 'Jefferson-Lincoln' Scarp was not accepted because of its 'political nature', and, I think, it is now called the J-L Scarp. On the other hand, the committee didn't understand the political nature of some of the other names and accepted them: Victory Crater is shaped somewhat like a letter 'V' and was named for Churchill; and Camelot was named for John Kennedy."]

[For the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, I have taken the view, as long as all lunar exploration was being done with telescopes, the IAU Nomenclature Committee had the responsibility of approving names. However, once the landing missions started, the prerogative of naming local features passed to the astronauts and their colleagues. As with the names bestowed by terrestrial pioneers and explorers, the choices were sometimes quirky and sometimes repeated existing names, but were always very personal. In all instances, I have either used the names the astronauts used during the missions or names - like Geophone Rock - that came into common, post-mission usage by the Apollo community. Note that the formal names of the Scarp - Jefferson-Lincoln, J-L, Lee, etc., are hardly ever used.]

137:53:24 Cernan: Okay. (Long Pause)

[Schmitt - "The prep-and-post card was Velcroed to the panel in front of us so that we could use it when we really couldn't use the checklists. You get to a certain point when you're pressurized in the suit where you really can't fumble with the book, so you just read a summary on the card."]

137:54:12 Fullerton: Okay.

[NASA's Public Affairs mentions that the crew is about one hour behind the timeline, a holdover from EVA-1. Houston anticipates a start of EVA-2 at 140:10, or about 5 p.m. Central Standard Time. The actual start will be about thirty minutes later than this estimate.]

[Long Comm Break]

[Now that they have finished eating, Gene and Jack are doffing their longjohns and are starting the EVA preps by donning their diapers, urine condoms, and Liquid Cooled Garments. They are on the right-hand column of Surface 3-8.]

137:57:34 Fullerton: Okay. Will do.

[Comm Break]

MP3 Audio Clip ( 19 min 56 sec )

138:00:30 Schmitt: Gordy. You broke up with a change-over or something. Say again. (Long Pause)

[As the Earth rotates under the Moon, the communications link is transferred from one terrestrial receiving station to another. There is a momentary loss of comm right at the handover, in this case from Madrid to Goldstone.]

[This compartment is on the lower right bulkhead next to Jack's station.]

[Long Comm Break]

[Schmitt - "We probably spent thousands of hours in the LM simulators."]

[The accompanying photo by Stacey O'Brien shows her husband, Journal Contributor Frank O'Brien, standing next to a LM simulator on display at the Cradle of Aviation Museum.]

[Schmitt - "Full-up simulations were relatively rare - only a few per mission - but we went through the critical phases over and over again. Depending on how complex each phase was, we would adjust the amount of time we spent. Also, if the console people felt we needed more time, they would recommend it. Even though we didn't run through the EVA preps and cabin configuration checks quite as much as some other phases of the mission, through the years I did an awful lot of them because, before I was assigned to a crew, I would check LM stowage for other crews. These were called Crew Compartment Fit and Function checks - 'C-squared/F-squared' or even 'CF-squared'. Mostly these were done with the LM or a mock-up fully configured, but there were times when some of the hardware simply didn't appear until fairly late and we would be using non-flight mock-ups or non-flight hardware as a substitute. Early on, the crews tried to force everybody to use flight hardware near the end, just to make sure that they never flew with anything they hadn't seen and which hadn't been fitted into the spacecraft and exercised in the ways that they would use it. In the early days the crews had been bitten by things that suddenly appeared and wouldn't work. That's where the whole concept of a C-squared, F-squared came about, I think."]

["Grumman would do a C-squared/F-squared before they shipped a flight LM and I often went up to do those. Fred Haise and I did several together. He and I were good friends and he would ask me to come up and do them with him. Some were done in shirtsleeve and some were done in the suits. And then we did vacuum chamber checks where we put the lunar module in a pressure chamber at Houston or the Cape. That was a major test, and both flight crews, Prime and Backup, would do those. The exception might have been Apollo 17 where John Young and Charlie Duke had just come off of Apollo 16. As I recall, they opted not to do those sorts of things."]

[NASA photo KSC-72P-537 was taken on December 4, two days before the scheduled launch, and shows Gene, Jack, and Ron examining emergency gear to be stowed in the Command Module. Dave Ballard, , Flight Crew Support Team Leader, writes "The crew is looking at some of the final stowage items, but I only recognize the emergency breathing masks at the right on the table. Left to right: Ray Malone, CSM Crew Station Engineer from our support team); Jack Schmitt, Bob Overmyer, astronaut support - we use to call them 'red shirts; Ron Evans; Bob Horne; Crew Equipment Engineer from our support team; Gene Cernan, Dave Ballard."]

[Ballard continues, "Within a day or so of this exercise, the final stowage would take place in the CSM with our team guys in the middle of it to assure everything met our requirements - no surprises! Guys like Ray Malone, the CSM Crew Station Engineer, and Terry Neal, the LM Crew Station Engineer, Bob Horne and Gene Chase, the Crew Equipment Engineers, spent months - traveling coast to coast - to make sure that the hundreds and hundreds of items called crew equipment met the crew requirements. Crew equipment included all things that had crew interface, like food, cameras, film, experiments, clothing, LiOH cannisters, emergency items, hygene items, etc, etc, etc. The time our guys spent on these items started with active and somewhat assertive participation in the design reviews and testing of the items, formulating the proper stowage plan for particular missions, briefing/training the crews, writing procedures for flight, for vehicle interface testing, fit checks and final stowage, etc."]

138:05:59 Fullerton: Go ahead.

138:06:03 Schmitt: One quick thought about the gravimeter (the LSG). And I'm sure it's been mentioned, but I'll say it. During the CF-squared, we asked about that bundle of wires that has contact with the gimbal. And when I deployed it, that bundle still had contact with the gimbal and everybody at the CF-squared said that was okay. But, you might think about it. I don't know what I could do to help if that is the problem. But that might be causing the problem here that it wouldn't cause on Earth.

138:06:37 Fullerton: Okay, Jack. I'll make sure the experts hear that. (Long Pause)

138:06:55 Cernan: Gordy, everything okay at home today?

138:07:02 Fullerton: (Misunderstanding the question) Yeah, everything is fine here.

138:07:09 Cernan: Well, thank you.

138:07:15 Fullerton: I'm not sure I copy your question precisely. Haven't talked to your home today, at all.

138:07:27 Cernan: Okay. Don't worry about it. I just thought you might have heard.

[Comm Break]

138:09:39 Fullerton: Okay; I'll sure do that. (Pause)

138:09:48 Schmitt: Gordy, has anybody heard from Tucson recently?

138:09:51 Fullerton: Check on that, Jack. Just a minute. (Long Pause)

[Jack's mother was staying with his younger sister in Tucson at the time.]

138:10:44 Fullerton: Okay, the update I do have...I think the EVA checklist changes, we'll just call you, real time. But, I do have one for the prep card. (Pause)

138:11:03 Schmitt: Go ahead.

138:11:07 Fullerton: Okay. On the front side there, middle column, lower half at "138:45 OPS Connect", halfway down (also on Surface 4-5), it says "install Purge Valve in PGA, red to red". Mark that LMP serial number 211; CDR, 208. This is to maximize the OPS operation, should you have to use it.

[Schmitt - "This probably means that each purge valve was optimized to a particular suit flow system, and they wanted to be sure that we each had the right one. We had taken the valves out at the end of the first EVA, and part of the EVA-2 prep was to put them back in."]

[Gordo will make a similar request at 161:23:18, prior to EVA-3 Preps. The fact that use of specific purge valves is not in the surface checklist and was not called up for EVA-1 suggests the possibility that the optimization is a response to the higher-than-expected OPS regulator pressures that Jack reported during EVA-1 preps at 115:45:31.

138:11:45 Fullerton: LMP, 211; CDR, 208.

138:11:56 Schmitt: I take it those are serial numbers.

138:11:58 Fullerton: That's right, the serial numbers on the purge valves.

[Comm Break. Astronaut Robert Parker takes over as CapCom.]

138:13:15 Schmitt: Do you want me to take notes?

138:13:18 Parker: No, I don't think there are essentially any notes required. I'll make a few real-time callups to you; but, I don't think there's anything you really have to write down.

138:13:31 Schmitt: Okay, Bob, I realize that things were getting a little hectic yesterday. But, if we end up making any changes where I don't need to get a (seismic) charge in my hands, that's an awfully good thing to call; because not only does it tire your hands out holding it, but it means you don't get as many pictures or Rover samples or anything else.

138:13:54 Parker: Roger. You guys are just ahead of us there. We were trying to get that up to you.

[Bob reads most of the following.]

[Houston still isn't sure of the exact landing point and is making an allowance for up to a quarter kilometer of driving at a speed of 7-8 kilometers per hour on both the outbound and inbound legs. This estimate is actually quite close to the truth.]

[The Rover battery covers are hinged at the front so that, with the Rover facing up-Sun, the open covers shade batteries and let them radiatively cool more quickly.]

138:17:30 Parker: Okay. Or whether it just represents the top of (a) very well churned up layer of a flow that was later than the subfloor, if you see what I'm saying there. All this says is that we're very interested, of course now...

138:17:51 Cernan: Roger, Bob.

[As mentioned previously, the ejecta blanket surrounding a crater represents an overturned section of the original stratigraphy. Materials which were originally on the surface form the bottom of the blanket and, generally, are exposed only at the outer fringe. Materials dug out from the bottom of the crater form the top of the blanket, at least close in to the rim. Because they didn't actually get to the Steno rim, they weren't able to get samples from the deepest parts of the crater.]

[Schmitt - "Camelot is about 600 meters in diameter, which means that it probably penetrated to about 150 meters depth. Because the regolith wasn't going to be more than a few meters deep in most places, Camelot was sure to have dug deep into the subfloor material. As I recall, we saw the boulders as we drove by on our way to Station 2 and that, later on, then influenced the actual choice of the Station 5 location. They hadn't anticipated that we would see boulders when we drove by Camelot because there hadn't been any evident in the pre-mission photos, only some variations in brightness which suggested that we would find boulders on the southeast rim."]

138:19:14 Parker: Okay. To summarize that again...I guess I got ahead of myself here in the little spiel they (the team in the Science Support Room) wrote up. At the present time we have two working hypotheses for the dark mantle and gabbro relationships to each other. One: the crystalline rocks that we found - the gabbros - are an upper unit of the subfloor with their dark mantle cover unrelated to them in time. Key observations that they suggest here are stratigraphy at Camelot - Station 5 - and other deep craters. Especially, perhaps, (dig) a trench in sheltered spots which are ungardened (undisturbed by micrometeorite impacts) - as in "plowed" - (and look) for an older regolith underneath the dark mantle, if such a thing could be found. We don't think we found that yesterday. Or, (take) a look at the superposition relations between dark mantle and boulders. Are there instances of the mantle on the boulders or, inversely, of small boulders on the mantle?

138:20:06 Parker: The second working hypothesis is that the dark mantle is regolith derived from a vitreous, vesicular, (basalt) flow top of the crystalline rock flow beneath. And, it (the write up from the Backroom) again goes (on) to say that perhaps the gabbro we sampled yesterday was indeed the late flow; and the regolith was derived from the vitreous, vesicular flow top, as it were. Again, many of the same observations are called for. In particular, they'd be interested then in looking at the coarser fines as they define as (being) from a millimeter to 20 millimeters (in grain size), for some sort of transitional lithologies and textures. In other words, what do the small, walnut-size rocks look like, if you can, in hand specimens?

[Cernan - "All of this came from the Backroom, where the scientists and geologists had looked over our first EVA. It seems as though they could have shortened what they read up to us, but it was like getting a debriefing from them. And we were eating and doing other things and it didn't hurt to listen. And it gave us an idea of their thinking, which was important."]

[Schmitt - "What Bob was probably reading was a piece of paper that the science room sent in. Lee Silver or Gordon Swann or Bill Muhlberger put together something that was then severely edited. This discussion is another illustration of the literal universal importance of superposition in a gravity field. Most of what we do as geologists on Earth is look for evidence of superposition or cross-cutting relationships. And here we're talking about the same thing on the Moon. Their thinking was almost entirely about 'how do we find out what units lie on top of what other units'. That is superposition."]

["I think that what had been surprising was that we had seen no evidence of the dark mantle. It had been so obvious in the pre-mission photographs - particularly in Lunar Orbiter and Apollo 15 photography of the site and even in photographs taken from Earth - that everybody thought that when we stepped out that we would be stepping onto the dark mantle and it would be obvious that it was dark mantle. Well, it wasn't obvious that there was dark mantle there. So, now, they were thinking about the observations we made the day before and they were trying to come to grips with what we saw - the regolith and this intermediate gabbro - and they were trying to summarize their hypotheses. As I've mentioned, the dark mantle question was not really answered until we got to Shorty and put the core tube down into the orange soil. When we pulled it up, the lower 50 centimeters or so of the 70-centimeter tube were dark - (almost) black. And right then it appeared that maybe that - whatever that black soil was - was a contributor to the dark mantle. And later on, it turned out to be devitrified orange soil - glassy, pyroclastic debris, volcanic material that is liquid when it is erupted and which hardened and/or crystallized as it fell back to the surface, a process similar to fire-fountaining that we see in Hawaii. Throughout the region, there was enough of this pyroclastic debris mixed in the regolith to give it - from a distance at least - the appearance of a dark mantle. And, in reality, it is a dark mantle! It has just been mixed up so much with ground-up subfloor material that there wasn't much of it left that you could see as a unit."]

["The dark mantle isn't localized in Taurus-Littrow but is found all along the east, southeast, and southern rim of Serenitatis where there are a lot of grabens and graben faulting along which you apparently had volcanic eruptions of this material. And then as you get into the south and southwest portion of Serenitatis, it changes to large area-deposits of orange and red glass, similar to the orange pyroclastic material we saw at Shorty. The large areas of orange were noticed by Ron after I saw the orange soil in the valley of Taurus-Littrow; and then I spent a lot of time defining it and checking it out once I got back into orbit."]

138:21:35 Parker: For your planning further ahead, we don't anticipate any significant changes in EVA-3. The charge number 5, which we were going to deploy at Emory but didn't, will not be deployed during EVA-2, but we'll deploy it on EVA-3 out at station 10. And, what we're going to do there is, when you take the eighth (that is, 1/8) pounder and put it between the seats, we'll then have the 3 pounder (charge number 5) left over, and we'd like to put that on one of the footpads in the Sun; that's probably either the minus-Z (east) or minus-Y (south) footpad. And, we'll leave it there in the Sun until the start of EVA-3, in which case we'll put in the Rover underneath the LMP's seat. And, thermally, that looks okay.

[At the start of EVA-1, they loaded a pallet containing four charges - numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7 - on the back of the Rover. They planned to deploy all but number 4 on the trip out to Emory but, because of the shortened traverse, also did not deploy number 5. Now, they will put number 4 between the seats - as planned - for deployment early in the EVA-2 traverse and will save number 5 for EVA-3.]

[Station 10, Sherlock Crater, will be a chance to sample the subfloor if, for some reason, good samples aren't found at Camelot.]

138:23:26 Parker: And, that's (pause) about everything we have. As I say, in summary, the big changes are going to be extra time at the beginning, taking care of the fender extension, and the probability of extra time at the end. Although we'll have to see how well the fender works and how things go. The probability of extra time at the end (is) to allow for dusting. And the time spent on those particular activities we'll probably end up taken out of the tasks at Station 3 and Station 4. Over. Comments?

[By now, Gene may have begun to attach his biomedical sensors. ]

[Cernan - "We almost never had time to just listen to somebody talking; we were always busy. We ate, we cleaned visors, we put on the biomed stuff. We didn't always have to tell Houston exactly what we were doing; they knew that from the checklists. We were always, always busy in that cockpit."]

138:24:30 Parker: Roger. The trench at the base of the Scarp, in other words, some of the stuff that you would be doing while Gene was taking the double core.

138:24:39 Schmitt: What do you gain by that?

138:24:42 Parker: Well. No comment on that, Jack.

138:24:51 Schmitt: If you haven't deleted Gene's tasks, then what am I supposed to do?

138:24:56 Parker: You're supposed to help Gene, I guess.

138:25:01 Schmitt: Well, but that's not the way we worked it, Bob. Let's play that one in real time.

[This is the seed of Jack's Station 3 frustrations.]

[The NASA center responsible for development of the Rover was the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.]

138:26:02 Cernan: Yeah, that's...

138:26:03 Parker: Go ahead.

138:26:08 Cernan: I'll look at that, Bob, what the meter has indicated in terms of a temperature change. I'll look and see if there's a bias on them at all.

[In general, although not exclusively, it is Gene who takes responsibility for spacecraft and Rover matters and Jack who takes responsible for geology. ]

[Schmitt - "I don't think it was anything more than the way things worked out. As I recall, we didn't sit around and establish that protocol. But it seemed to work pretty well." ]

[Cernan - "Jack might have spent more time than I did on the EVA planning, but we were all involved. I involved myself mostly in the operational side - where we could go, what we could do - and left the geological side to the people who knew a lot more about it than I did. During planning and training, the CapComs worked with us as though they were going to make the traverses themselves."]

138:26:26 Schmitt: Bob, I think, based on what I saw yesterday, that the chances are pretty good that all the big blocks out here in the dark mantle area will be pretty much the gabbro. By the way, I looked at that with a hand lens last night, and I don't know that you got the report, and I'm back to saying that it's probably closer to 30 to 40 percent plagioclase. It's probably just a good gabbro, a clinopyroxene gabbro, and it apparently has a fair amount of ilmenite in it. There's some bright, shiny flakes within the vugs and some dark minerals in the matrix that are probably ilmenite.

[Cernan - "Although we were all exposed to these geologic terms and trained pretty hard - particularly if you'd trained as part of a backup crew or a prime crew as I had on Apollo 10, 14, and 17 - you wouldn't find anyone but Jack who would make a statement that would include words like 'clinopyroxene gabbro with a fair amount of ilmenite'. Now, you'd find people who would know enough about what they were seeing to say 'there's bright, shiny flakes and dark minerals in the matrix; but the precision is going to come from somebody like Jack who has used the terms all his professional life and who, therefore, uses them with a great deal of confidence. That's the advantage of having a geologist on the surface; in real time, Jack could give the people in the Backroom a much clearer picture of what he was seeing than the rest of us usually could."]

[Schmitt - "I'm getting closer to the truth than they were with this statement. This is exactly what the little beads of glass happened to be. They had a very high titanium content and were dark because of it. A lucky call."]

138:28:18 Parker: Okay. Copy that. And, we'll be anxious to see what else you find out today. And one last word for your interest: the Marshall people have decided to allow us to go to 140 degrees on this EVA with the batteries, if necessary.

138:28:35 Cernan: Okay.