Landing at Fra Mauro

Preparations for EVA-1

 

Post-landing Activities

Corrected Transcript and Commentary Copyright © 1995 by Eric M. Jones.
All rights reserved.
MP3 audio clips by Thomas Schwagmeier.
Last revised 14 October 2016.

MP3 Audio Clip ( 1 hr 0 min 32 sec )

108:15:24 Mitchell: 413, plus ten thousand. That was a beautiful one (that is, a beautiful landing).

108:15:27 Shepard: Okay, we're slightly off (vertical). We landed on a slope, but other than that, we're in great shape. Right on the landing site.

[They have landed at 3.6733 degrees south latitude and 17.4653 west longitude. Readers should note that, at the equator, 0.0001 degrees (0.36 seconds) of either latitude or longitude corresponds to 3 meters. A discussion of landing site coordinates is linked here.]

[The following procedures are on Page 7 in the Apollo 14 LM Timeline Book.]

108:15:38 Shepard: Okay.

[Mitchell - "I think that has to do with the descent tanks and making sure that they're shut off. Now, I'm just pulling this off the top of my head."]

[Jones - "To me, recycling the valves means..."]

[Mitchell - "Turn it on, then back off. And I remember those valves - I don't remember they were called Parker valves - but I remember the instances. You could hear a definite 'Thunk' when you opened and closed those valves. My recollection is that that was to make sure that the descent tanks were sealed and that, when we separated - or any time before that - the residual descent fuel wasn't spewed out onto the lunar surface. That's my recollection."]

[Here, Ed is mistaken. The Parker valves were the RCS propellant isolation or shut-off valves. They were made by a U.S. unit of Parker-Hannifin PLC. See the discussion following 110:33:41 in the Apollo 12 landing chapter.]

108:15:49 Shepard: Descent Helium Reg 1, Closed; talkback barber pole; and the Oxidizer Fuel Vents are gray; Master Arm is On; Descent Vent (valves), Fire.

[Jones - "You're getting ready to leave - if you have to?"]

[Mitchell - "You are shutting down the descent system. You're finished with the descent system. You're taking all of those valves that go between descent and ascent and, by and large, putting them in a safe condition. And, since the descent stage is a dead vehicle at this point - you're not going to use any of that - you don't want it venting out onto the surface and contaminating the surface. You don't want anything to happen while you're out on the surface. This is getting it in a safe condition. I don't remember exactly what each one of these particular valves does, but I do remember Descent Vent. We vented the pressure out of the descent system."]

[Jones - "So you're venting the helium with which the tanks were pressurized. And then, after you get the descent stage safe, then you prepare the ascent stage for an emergency lift-off. You take it as far as you can toward an emergency lift-off; and then you make the system quiet for the lunar stay."]

108:16:01 Shepard: Arm is Off.

108:16:02 Mitchell: Okay. (Garbled) fuel.

108:16:05 Shepard: And they're coming down.

108:16:06 Mitchell: They're coming down. Okay.

108:16:07 Shepard: Okay.

[The pressure readings in the descent-stage propellant tanks are decreasing.]

108:16:09 Shepard: (Garbled)

108:16:10 Mitchell: Ascent, then Descent.

108:16:14 Shepard: Okay. Ascent's still good, Descent 1 and Descent 2. We're coming down on both.

108:16:22 Shepard: Okay. Ascent Helium Monitor cycle. (Garbled).

108:16:27 Haise: Antares, Houston. You're Stay for T1.

[After a quick look at the health of the spacecraft, Houston has decided that an immediate lift-off will not be necessary.]

108:16:33 Mitchell: Roger; thank you.

108:16:33 Shepard: ...Stay for T1. Ascent Helium 2 looks good, Ascent Helium 1 looks good.

108:16:36 Mitchell: Okay. (Pause) Okay, O2 Quantity Monitor; I'll take a look at those.

108:16:40 Shepard: Take a look at those babies.

108:16:43 Mitchell: Okay. Just like they did in orbit. Ascent 2 is full; back to Descent. All right. And the (window-mounted 16-mm) sequence camera is Off. (Pause) Okay. VHF A Transmitter to Voice. We're Stay for Tl, so I'll do a 414.

[This is the first line in the 'Stay' paragraph following 15:00 on Page 7.]

108:17:15 Mitchell: Plus 20000. And, 400 plus 4.

108:17:24 Shepard: 400, plus 40000.

108:17:27 Mitchell: 414. Did I get that right? Houston, did I get a 414, plus 20000, in?

108:17:35 Haise: Stand by. (Pause) That's affirm, Ed. You got it in.

108:17:44 Shepard: Okay, 0.01.

108:17:46 Mitchell: (Responding to Haise) Okay.

108:17:51 Shepard: There are your Noun 43s, Houston.

[Journal Contributor Frank O'Brien notes, "Noun 43 displays the PGNS-calculated location of the landing site - in latitude, longitude and distance from the center of the moon."]

108:18:00 Shepard: Yep. About the flattest place around here, though.

108:18:03 Mitchell: Yeah. What's that, about 8 degrees of roll we're in? Eight degree slope.

108:18:07 Haise: Okay. We got the Noun 43, Al.

108:18:13 Shepard: Okay. 108:18:13 Mitchell: Okay. Let me copy those down, like I'm supposed to. Back on our book. (Pause)

108:18:23 Shepard: Stop is Reset.

[Mitchell - "That's the engine stop button. It was a whole button and you pushed it down. Now he's reset it and it doesn't mean anything anymore...Oh, yes, it does. It sends a signal into the computer, so you're getting that stop signal out of there. The descent engine has been disarmed, fuel's vented, etc. Now you're clearing the logic out of the computer."]

[Jones - "At the time, were there any on-board computer systems in high performance aircraft?"]

[Mitchell - "They had some pretty sophisticated systems in 747s at that point. The 747 was virtually a brand-new airplane. The reason I can say that is, even when I was in post-graduate school in Monterey in the late 50s and early 60s, we went to Boeing and they were putting some computer systems in. Now, they're much more upgraded and exotic these days than they were then. And, also, the normal breed of pilot wasn't too keen on computers flying his aircraft at that point. Computers weren't very well accepted and the engineers were ramming 'em down our throats. And the FAA was ramming them down the pilots' throats. But there were some crude but basic computer systems in aircraft like the 747."]

[Jones - "This system in the LM was basically state of the art?"]

[Mitchell - "Yeah. As far as aviation systems were concerned. And it was simple. I like to make the comparison in many of my talks that the PGNS system was a 64 thousand bit computer. God, a Tandy or Commodore has eight times that much on the 8-bit bytes. And it was a 64 thousand bit computer, one in the LM and one in the Command Module. And that's essentially what we went to the Moon with. Now, by the time we got to the lunar missions, we were at MIT and the Instrumentation Lab up there, oh, every month or so, battling for another bit or two to set a flag here or set a flag there and get this out of there. It was very tough. And it was not just software. It had to be firmware. So we were really running out of space to handle those missions; and 64 thousand bits looked like a lot back in the early days, and then by the time we got around to the missions, there just wasn't enough space in that computer. So it was a masterful programming job to get all the functions that had to be done - the guidance and control, orienting telescopes and the stable platform - and still having the descent programs and everything we had. And to do it in 64 thousand bits was absolutely a masterful job. I don't know how the guys at Instrumentation Lab ever made it work."]

[It is difficult to tell who says 'Hold it'. One possibility is that Al was about to look at something else in the computer, not realising that Ed hadn't written the values into a table.]

108:18:31 Mitchell: Pardon?

108:18:32 Shepard: Minus 367, minus 1751.

108:18:37 Mitchell: Minus 367; 1 what?

108:18:43 Shepard: 1751.

108:18:46 Mitchell: What was the altitude readout?

108:18:48 Shepard: Want to give me targeting from P12, please? I need Tig (Time of Ignition for the next launch opportunity, called T2).

108:18:53 Mitchell: Okay. (Pause) T2, 109.

108:19:02 Shepard: Plus 109. Okay.

108:19:05 Mitchell: 04.

108:19:06 Shepard: Plus 04.

108:19:09 Mitchell: Plus 3406.

108:19:12 Shepard: 406. I have 109:04:34.06.

108:19:17 Mitchell: Looks good.

[Because of the launch delay, the T2 comes at about 108:24:32 in transcript - or actual mission elapsed - time.]

108:19:27 Mitchell: Okay, that's good. Go with the Pad value, 55124.

[This appears to be the horizontal velocity they would need to achieve to reach the desired orbit - 5512.4 feet per second. They are entering a value that is printed in the checklist. Because of the limited memory available in the computer, they don't have room for all the numbers they need but, rather, only the ones they need during a particular phase of the mission.]

108:19:46 Mitchell: Okay.

[Jones - "You obviously knew the systems well enough that you knew what to expect, what things were supposed to be happening, in what sequence, and when. This is a very highly interactive level of computing."]

[Mitchell - "Yes, yes, yes."]

[Jones - "The verbs are telling the computer what functions you want it to perform and the nouns..."]

[Mitchell - "The verb is the action you take, the dynamic portion of it. Do this or do that. And the nouns indicated the particular section or program that you were in. They could indicate input and output also."]

108:19:49 Mitchell: Oh, wait a minute. Now. Houston, how do you like the AGS alignment? Should we go ahead and update the state vector, or stay with what we have?

108:19:57 Haise: Stand by. (Long Pause)

[I asked for a description of the state vector.]

[Mitchell - "The AGS, of course, did not have a continuous computing capability. It did its computations based upon the acceleration vector. It had, really, no memory, no state vector. You set a state vector and it did a DR (dead-reckoning) tracking based upon an accelerometer input."]

[Jones - "Dead reckoning from an initial configuration - position and velocity in three axes - of the LM."]

[Mitchell - "That's right. Now, the PGNS system was considerably more sophisticated and it was easier to update...Houston would update the PGNS system with a state vector, then we could update the AGS system from the PGNS system, merely by setting in the state vector, hitting zero, and it would initialize the AGS to the PGNS. So, what was going on here was getting an initial state vector for the AGS for a return to orbit. We're simply making its initial state vector correspond to the PGNS state vector."]

108:20:17 Mitchell: Okay, Go as is. 411, plus 10000.

108:20:21 Shepard: (Garbled).

108:20:25 Mitchell: 411, plus 10000.

108:20:26 Shepard: Right.

108:20:27 LM Crew: 410, plus zeros.

108:20:31 Shepard: Okay, we're waiting on a stay (for T2). (Long Pause) Okay, Descent Helium (garbled under Haise)...

108:21:08 Haise: Antares, Houston. You are Stay for T2.

108:21:13 Mitchell: Roger, Roger. Thank you.

108:21:15 Shepard: Okay! Stay for T2! Tape Recorder, Off; ICS/PTT.

[PTT is Push-to-Talk. They are configuring the comm system so that, if they want to talk to Houston, they have to push a switch.]

108:21:35 Haise: Yeah. Those guys did...

108:21:36 Mitchell: (Garbled).

108:21:36 Haise: ...a lot of scratching around there, Ed.

108:21:39 Mitchell: Yes, sir. We sure appreciate that.

108:21:43 Shepard: You bet. It really saved the mission. (Long Pause)

108:22:22 Haise: Antares, Houston.

108:22:27 Mitchell: Go ahead.

108:22:29 Haise: Now that you're sitting still there, we'd like to try to get the steerable (high-gain antenna) going. Pitch, plus 124; Yaw, minus 42; and stay in Slew.

[The LM antenna could operate in the Slew mode or the Auto mode. In Slew, the crew manually pointed the antenna at a fixed point in the sky and it stayed there until the crew changed the pointing.]

[Jones - "Slew is manual pointing and Auto lets it track the signal."]

[Mitchell - "Yeah. Automatically."]

[Jones - "So, basically, it watches the needle and..."]

[Mitchell - "Peaks itself. It's a gain-following system. And, since the Earth was almost directly overhead, it would be very dramatically affected by that roll angle of the spacecraft (that is, the rotation around the axis pointing forward through the EVA hatch). And they had to compute those numbers, given our attitude and our position on the surface and then make the decision whether it could automatically track. Because it was very close to a gimbal lock position, I think."]

[Interested readers can find a discussion of gimbal lock in the Apollo 11 transcript at 104:59:35.]

108:23:24 Haise: (Having been talking to someone in Houston) Antares, Houston; say again.

108:23:31 Mitchell: You have the steerable, Fredo. And locked up in Slew.

108:23:36 Haise: Okay, Antares, it looks good.

[Long Comm Break.]

[During this Comm Break, Al and Ed complete their post-landing checklist and begin the tasks listed in the LM Lunar Surface Checklist, beginning with page 1-1. After resetting various circuit breakers and switches at the top of the page, they move to the middle of the page and reconfigure the Environmental Control System (ECS) and remove their helmets, gloves, and the waist restraints (tethers) that held them in place during the landing. In his next transmission, Ed is referring to computer readouts called out at the lower-right of the checklist page.]

108:28:53 Haise: Okay, we copy that.

[Long Comm Break.]

[On Sur 1-2, Al and Ed will determine the local direction of gravity as part of the inertial platform alignment procedure.]

[Haise's next transmission has to do with the star sightings that Al and Ed will do on Sur 1-3.]

108:32:54 Shepard: Go ahead, Fredo.

108:32:56 Haise: Okay. Because of your attitude, sitting there, Al, the first star there, Arcturus, is going to come up in detent 2 rather than detent 3, so...

108:33:10 Shepard: Okay. Very good.

[Long Comm Break]

[Mitchell - "I'm pretty sure it's yaw attitude (that is causing the shift). It could have been yaw, it could have pitch, but I think it was yaw attitude. And what that is that, since we were...If it's yaw, the detent positions would be (indicating) one, two, three..."]

[Jones - "And the telescope would actually click into a physical detent, into one of several positions in yaw."]

[Mitchell - "Yeah, and because of roll...Let's see. That sounds right. It was one two three. (Left to right). So if it was normally in three to have Arcturus in the telescope but, because of that roll position, it would put Arcturus in the second detent instead of the third detent."]

[Jones - "And the way you were holding your fingers, there, you had 1, 2, 3 from left to right and the spacecraft has right-side down ('it was rolled right'), so the detents roll past from high number to low number past the star."]

[There were actually six detents, with the numbering starting from front left (no.1) and going clockwise around to right with a spacing of 60 degrees between detents and ending with left rear (No. 6). The center of each 60-degree field-of-view was 45 degrees above the horizon. That meant there was a fair bit of overlap for stars with elevations around 45 degrees. The lunar module was yawed left only 1.4 degrees and pitched down only 1.8 degrees (according to the Mission Report). Neither of these would move stars from a planned detent to an adjacent one. It was the 6.9-degree right roll that was most significant for stars in the forward detents.]

[In his next transmission, Al is referring to the results of the gravity alignment which is called out in the left-hand column on Sur 1-2.]

108:37:08 Haise: Go ahead, Antares.

108:37:14 Shepard: Do you have our Noun 93 (component value)s?

108:37:17 Haise: Roger, Al. We got them.

[Long Comm Break]

108:41:12 Haise: Roger, Antares.

[Long Comm Break]

[Mitchell, from the 1971 Technical Debrief - "Before we started the P57 series (of star sightings), we observed that the butt of the (rendezvous) radar antenna was in the field-of-view of the AOT (Alignment Optical Telescope). If I recall correctly, that should have been set down out of the way in orbit (before the descent). It was not; and it apparently drifted up from the time it had been set...We had to power up the antenna and drive it down out of the way of the telescope before proceeding with P57."]

[Jones - "I gather that the purpose of the star sightings is to determine the spacecraft attitude."]

[Mitchell - "What we're going to do is level the stable (inertial) platform. They gave us state vectors and we know we're on the lunar surface, but we have to align the stable platform for lift-off...You wanted to keep the spacecraft and the stable platform ready for lift-off at all times, and that's what the star sightings were about."]

[Jones - "And then, in addition to the star sightings, you also did some gravity measurements."]

[Mitchell - "By moving the platform, you could measure the gravitational field. I guess the accelerometers were sensitive enough to use for a gravitational field measurement. Because of the mascons in the surface of the Moon (variations in the crustal density caused by the big impact basins) locally the gravitational field could be at a slightly different strength than what one would compute from a homogeneous sphere. As I recall, that was one of the measurements - or a data point - they wanted to get. To try to calibrate the absolute magnitude of the gravitational field at that point on the Moon. I may be totally out to lunch when I say that."]

[Jones - "So it's a mix of a science purpose with a platform alignment."]

[Mitchell - "It's fundamentally platform alignment but, as I recall, the scientists wanted to get a data point to see if there's any validity in making a gravitational measurement."]

[Jones - "How big was the field-of-view of the AOT?"]

[Mitchell - "Sixty degrees."]

[Jones - "So you're looking at a sizable chunk of the sky. You've got a spiral mark in there and a cursor. Was the cursor movable on the spiral? I've run across the words spiral and cursor."]

[Mitchell - "I think that's correct. The Lunar Module AOT was different than the command module telescope, because of the lunar surface alignment. And I think that's the way you did it. You could move it to one of the detents and then it did have a spiral. And you could run the cursor so you could get an angle and a reading on the spiral. And then there's a way to convert that into elevation and azimuth. And the computer did that."]

[Apollo 14 and 17 Training Coordinator Tex Ward writes, "There was a small observatory on the roof of building 16A (at the Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston). It contained the Apollo Optical Telescope (AOT) that the engineering people used and the crews used it some, also, for training."]

108:46:01 Mitchell: Go ahead.

108:46:03 Haise: Okay. We need to change the second star in your second technique to 57. That's on page 1-5 (in the Surface Checklist).

108:46:20 Mitchell: Okay.

[Haise's "second technique" is a second set of star sightings which starts at the top of Sur 1-5.]

108:46:58 Mitchell: Okay. I copy the second star on page 1-5, is Beta Centauri instead of Gacrux. It's number 56. And I presume it'll be in detent 1. And vectors, Noun 88s, are minus 0.21408, minus 0.12572, and minus 0.43401.

108:47:28 Haise: Okay. That's correct, Ed. (Long Pause)

108:48:15 Haise: Antares, Houston. We're going to have a site handover down here in a couple of minutes.

108:48:23 Shepard: Okay, Fredo. That was a real fine job. Thank you, buddy.

108:48:27 Haise: Thank you, Al.

[Very Long Comm Break]

[The Moon is about to set at the Goldstone Station in California and, for the next eight hours, comm will go through the Honeysuckle Station in eastern Australia. Al's "real fine job" suggests that he thinks Houston is about to have a shift change and is thanking Haise for his help in the landing. Indeed, there will be a shift change in about 30 minutes, but that is not what Haise was talking about.]

109:00:42 Mitchell: Go ahead.

109:00:43 Haise: Okay. You can go on by those alarms, Al. I think they're due to hitting Mark Reject before you're doing Verb 32 Enter. That isn't necessary; you can just reload that over them.

109:01:03 Mitchell: Okay. We need to get rid of this mark, Fredo; we're going to reject it and start over.

109:01:11 Haise: Okay.

[Long Comm Break]

[They are on Sur 1-4, still doing the first set of star sightings.]

109:06:24 Haise: Stand by, Ed. (Pause) Okay. They look good, Antares. You can torque them...

109:06:36 Mitchell: Al says he can't do any better.

109:06:39 Haise: You're right. (Long Pause)

[Mitchell - "We've got a good mark now and that's to get a new alignment. And 'torque those' means to torque the gyros...torque the platform around to the new alignment."]

109:07:10 Haise: Stand by. (Long Pause) Antares, Houston. Recommend Accept. (Pause)

109:07:48 Mitchell: Okay. We're gonna accept.

[Long Comm Break. Astronaut Bruce McCandless, who was EVA CapCom on Apollo 11, replaces Haise.]

109:17:30 McCandless: Antares, this is Houston. Go ahead.

109:17:36 Mitchell: Hello, Bruce. Al says that Beta Centauri, which you wanted for this second star, is in detent 6. Do you want it in 1 or 6, now that you've changed it? (Pause)

[The current time is 10:21 UTC on 5 February 1971. Beta Centrauri is at an azimuth of 185 and an elevation of 49 degrees. With the LM rolled 7 degrees to the north, the star will be 7 degrees lower in the field-of-view than the elevation suggests. The 1.4 degree yaw to the left will move the star a little bit right in the field-of-view; and the 1.8 degree pitch down will move it left and up. The net result is that Beta Centauri is in the overlap region between detents 6 and 1, but roughly 5 degrees on the detent 6 side of the center of the overlap.]

[Jones - "When you were counting detents before, you counted to three."]

[Mitchell - "I think if you go all the way around, there's six."]

[Jones - "You just made a circle parallel to the floor."]

[Mitchell - (after thinking it through) "The part of the superstructure has to obstruct it when you're looking directly behind, so it may be...(look it up)."]

[Jones - "But you're basically looking around in azimuth."]

[Mitchell - "Oh, yes. It's azimuth. But I didn't remember six detents. Obviously, six is next to one, if you go all the way around."]

109:18:04 Mitchell: Okay.

[Long Comm Break]

[Jones - "Why 'Scorpio'?"]

[Mitchell - "He's addressing us. The star Antares is in the constellation of Scorpio. That's just in Bruce's head. That's a Bruce McCandless mistake. Instead of saying Antares, he's saying Scorpio."]

[Jones - "How delightfully obscure!"]

[Mitchell - "The reason the spacecraft name is Antares is because Antares is the sighting star just before we started down. And the main sighting star on the lunar surface."]

[Jones - "So you hadn't had a name for the spacecraft... You named it pretty late in the process, is that what you're saying?"]

[Mitchell - "No. That part of the timing was set fairly early."]

[Jones - "Oh, of course. You guys were recycled at Fra Mauro after 13 didn't go there."]

[Mitchell - "It would change quite a bit (depending) on the day because of position of the Moon. Yeah, that'd be pretty sensitive to time (of launch). The Moon-Sun alignment would determine your attitude with respect to Scorpio at that time (of year)."]

[Jones - "Because you had to land, what, within a day of sunrise."]

[Mitchell - "Yeah. We only had a few hours of lunar day latitude with respect to angle on the Sun. We had to land at 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning lunar time to get the Sun angle - what? - above 12 degrees and, as I recall, 15 degrees."]

[Jones - "And it's 12 degrees per day, so that's pretty tight. And it's basically for shadows? Shadows long enough that you can see definitions but not so long that you're overlapping and obscuring things."]

[Mitchell - "Well, that and not so long that the heat flux from the overhead Sun isn't getting to you and creating suit problems."]

[Ed means that they didn't want to land so late in the lunar morning that the lunar surface would get hot enough that the PLSSs would have trouble keeping them cool.]

[Jones - "So Antares would have been the principle guide star for this month, but it would have been something else the next month."]

109:26:01 McCandless: Stand by.

[Comm Break]

109:27:20 Mitchell: Okay. (Pause) Al says the star ball's aligned a lot better today.

[Mitchell - "This is an inside joke. It has to do with the simulation of sightings through the LM simulator telescope. We'd have a lot of problems with the software; and the stars weren't quite appearing where they were supposed to appear. And you wouldn't get these small torquing angles. That was a simulator software problem. What we're saying here, in a snide sort of way, is that 'hey, the star ball's perfect. It's exactly where it should be.'"]

[Jones - "And the star ball is what? Something wrapped around the telescope in the simulator."]

[Mitchell - "Yeah. It's an electronic planetarium, is what it is. And, hell, we're looking at the real thing."]

109:27:35 Mitchell: Yeah. As a matter of fact, no blind spots.

109:27:39 McCandless: Beautiful! (Long Pause)

[Mitchell - "This is another training reference. On the training machine, you could move your telescope around and a star that was over here would suddenly disappear and then it would appear over here. There were spots in the telescope where the electronics didn't match up and the star that was right in front of you would just suddenly disappear on you."]

109:28:32 McCandless: Antares, this is Houston. Stay! Over. (Pause) Antares, this is Houston. Stay. Acknowledge. Over.

109:28:53 Shepard: Okay. We're having a little chuckle about that transmission but we acknowledge, very happily.

109:28:59 Mitchell: And we will stay.

109:29:00 McCandless: Roger. Out. (Long Pause)

[Mitchell - "You listen to the patter of it and the way Bruce says things; it's kind of like 'Stay, Fido.' That's just the way Bruce talked."]

109:29:48 McCandless: That's affirmative.

109:29:53 Mitchell: Roger. 047, plus 37773; 053 is plus 00610, and we're standing by for a P22 Acq(uisition) time.

[P22 is a program which will perform a radar track of the Command Module on its next pass over the landing site.]

109:30:17 Mitchell: Good readback. (Long Pause)

109:30:40 Shepard: Houston, Antares is in P00 and Data.

109:30:45 McCandless: Houston. Roger. Out.

[Comm Break]

[By putting the computer in Program Zero-Zero - pronounced "pooh", as in "Winnie-the-Pooh" - the crew is configuring the machine so that it will accept an updated state vector and other parameters radioed up from Houston. This is the "Updata Link" step on Sur 1-7.]

109:32:58 Mitchell: Okey-doke. We're pressing on with our powerdown checklist.

[Long Comm Break]

[On pages Sur 1-8 and 1-9, they are reconfiguring the circuit breakers as shown on the charts, with black dots indicating breakers that are pushed in and white dots indicating breakers that are pulled. Pages 1-10 and 1-11 list the desired switch configurations and, finally, the left-hand column of Sur 1-12 lists valve settings on the Environmental Control System (ECS).]

109:38:13 Shepard: That's affirmative.

109:38:15 McCandless: Roger.

[Long Comm Break]

[Because of the delayed launch, the Ground Elapsed Time, as used in the Journal, of P22 acquisition time will be approximately 110:10.]

109:43:35 McCandless: Roger. Out. (Long Pause) Antares, this is Houston. The uplink's complete. Computer's yours.

109:44:07 Shepard: Okay. Thank you.

[Comm Break]

109:45:50 Shepard: Okay. We'll be right with you on the condition of the lunar surface here momentarily. We're configuring one of the (70mm Hasselblad) cameras at the moment (as per the righthand column of Sur 1-12). With respect to vehicle roll, it looks as though it's probably due mostly to the terrain. There's not really a good level spot to land on around here, unless we proceeded (west) quite a bit closer to Doublet. So we'll advise you further on that after we start the EVA.

109:46:23 McCandless: Okay, very good. Sounds like you may have a nice level site over near Doublet for the ALSEP though, doesn't it?

109:46:31 Shepard: Well, we'll find one. (Pause)

{Comm Break}

[Jones - "Because you were going to pull the MET going up to Cone Crater, which is east of you, you didn't want to fly further on toward Doublet because that would have taken you farther away?"]

[Mitchell - "Or, that might have been the secondary thing. The primary thing was simply the test pilot's desire to be accurate. I mean, that's where they wanted the goddamn thing put down, that's where we were going to put it down. Just pride in perfection."]

[Jones - "You're one of the few crews who didn't spend a couple of minutes figuring out exactly where you were...or, at least talking about it on air."]

[Mitchell - "Well, we knew exactly where we were. We knew we had to be within a few feet of where we were supposed to be. We had good landmarks. We could see the landmarks and we came right in on them. We couldn't have been very far from where we were supposed to be. It turns out we were something like 30 or 40 feet. He'd moved over just a little bit and set it down."]

[Checklist pages Sur 1-13, 1-14, 1-15, 1-16, and 1-17 contain a lengthy wish list of observations that the geologists wanted the crew to make. In hindsight, the level of detail seems utterly unnecessary and later crews were spared such lists.]

[Sur 1-13 contains two diagrams showing a sequence of photographs that the geologists wanted the crew to take. The notation [8,74] means f/8 at 74-foot focus. These window pans are AS14-65-9202 to 9215. In frame 9202, Turtle Rock is just to the right of center.]

109:50:08 McCandless: That's affirmative, Antares. Go ahead with your description.

109:50:22 Shepard: Okay. As you may have heard, after P64 and pitchover, Cone Crater and the landing site were immediately visible. The Sun-angle was good. We were able to recognize it perhaps even easier than we were on the L&A display at the Cape.

[Mitchell - "The L&A was a 3D model of the site and they flew a miniature TV over it and put that (picture) into the window of the lunar module simulator."]

[Jones - "Do you remember if it was floor-mounted and the camera flew over it, as opposed to ceiling mounted?"]

[Mitchell - "I frankly think it was ceiling mounted. What's a little confusing is that we had a couple of terrain maps and I remember looking at them laying on the floor. But, as I recall, when they were mounted in position, it was the other way around; it was mounted on the ceiling."]

[Jones - "And that was at the Cape, it says here. Did you have LM simulators at both places?"]

[Mitchell - "We could do lunar landing simulations at both places, but the one at the Cape was in a far higher state of readiness, as I recall."]

[Jones - "Any particular reason for the emphasis on the Cape versus Houston?"]

[Mitchell - "Oh, that's because the Cape's where we did the final training and everything. The new guys coming along would use the one at Houston, but the active crew - ready to go - would train at the Cape. We were just on their backs all the time to keep that thing absolutely up to snuff, with the latest information. And, as new information would come in from mission to mission, it was the Cape simulator that got updated first because that was the one used for the next crew's final practices. So you'd make sure that one was right. Then you'd worry about the one in Houston."]

[Jones - "And by 'the new guys coming along' you mean the prime and backup crew for the subsequent mission."]

[Mitchell - "And for basic training for people not even assigned to a crew. They got to fit in on the thing whenever there was some free time."]

[Jones - "The order of priority was the prime crew for the imminent flight, their backup crew..."]

[Mitchell - "Well, yeah. The prime and backup crews had priority. The backup crew had to be as ready as prime crew; but, of course, between those two, the prime commander got to say when he wanted it and when the other guy got it."]

[Jones - "Let's see. Gene Cernan and Ron Evans and Joe Engle were your backups."]

[Mitchell - "On 14. Yeah, right...God; I didn't used to have to think so long about the answers to these questions."]

[Mitchell - "This comment of Al's doesn't mean we landed 100 meters short of where we planned to land. That was his sighting angle. The plan was, if anything, to bring the LPD short. Then, he could take over and inch it on up. That's the reason we had a slow approach and touchdown. By having the spacecraft automatic system aim for a hundred yards or so short, he could then take it over manually, ease it in, look over the terrain very carefully, and land it right where we wanted to."]

[Jones - "And that goes along with the philosophy of having some forward velocity."]

[Mitchell - "Exactly. So we're creeping forward and looking at it and making sure that what's below us is exactly where we want to set it down. And that's the way we went in."]

109:52:32 McCandless: That's affirmative, Antares; we're copying you four-oh. Over.

[There is some static in the comm. When Bruce says that they are '4-oh', he may mean that they are four-by-four in readability and clarity. He certainly does not mean '4-0 (zero)' because, in a Readability and Signal Strength Report, each are given in the range from 1 to 5.]

[Shepard, from the 1971 Technical Debrief - "I said that we had no problem in recognizing where we were, as far as the site location was concerned. There was some question whether it (the intended landing spot) was plus or minus 50 feet from where we actually ended up. I might comment that we did actually land in kind of a low spot. I thought that we were looking ahead, downrange, to Doublet Crater and found that it was slightly above the eye-level elevation from the ascent stage, while we were still in the ascent stage. I looked out the LPD and it looked like it was about 1 degree (above them). I was taking vehicle pitch into consideration and it was 1 1/2 degrees above our eye level. So we were a bit below the level of Doublet."]

[Jones - "When Al says 'depression', what is he really trying to say?"]

[Mitchell - "He's really meaning, probably, the horizon to the north, the bounding ridge to the north."]

[Jones - "The ridge that forms the local horizon. Could you see over it?"]

[Mitchell - "No. The interesting thing is that the horizon appeared to be very, very close everywhere you looked. And it was sloping up to the right and it was moving to the mountains to the left - which was south. As a matter of fact, we were in a general depression. (Behind us) to the east or ahead of us (to the west) it didn't rise as sharply and, of course, Cone Crater and that ridge was behind us. But even ahead of us, you could tell the horizon did not look very far away. So what he's really referring to is a ridge that forms the local horizon."]

109:54:01 McCandless: Roger. Ed, go ahead.

109:54:04 Mitchell: Okay, Houston. I'm just trying to get oriented; I think I can see quite a few of the craters that are out my window are here on the map. There are several large enough to be seen on the map, and in addition there's some reasonably large boulders. I will try to get us located first; then I'll describe what I see.

109:54:33 McCandless: Okay. (Long Pause)

[At 109:54:48 in the audio recording, we hear an unidentified speaker on Earth, possibly the Flight Director, say to someone other than the LM crew "Go ahead".]

109:55:33 McCandless: Antares, Houston...

109:55:35 Mitchell: ...a bit more toward Triplet than that. (Responding to McCandless) Go ahead.

109:55:38 McCandless: Roger. Updated P22 acquisition time, 110 plus 51 plus 00, and that will coincide with the (radar) angles that you got onboard. You should expect to see the CSM about 30 seconds later. Over.

[Mitchell - "P22 is a program that tracks the Command Module. Using the rendezvous radar."]

[Because of the launch delay, the actual ground elapsed time, as used in the Journal, will be 110:10:58.]

109:56:03 McCandless: 110:51:00.

109:56:09 Mitchell: Okay, 00. Thank you.

109:56:11 McCandless: Roger; and continue. (Long Pause)

109:56:35 Mitchell: Okay, Houston. As Al pointed out, toward Doublet is a rise, and then the ridge that we have talked about - that is beyond Doublet - is very pronounced. It forms our skyline or my near horizon. And we seem to be sitting in a bowl. It slopes toward us from the west; it's rather choppy, I might admit, undulating, but the ridge beyond Doublet is the highest thing I can see in front of me. Looking around to the right, the skyline is quite undulating. There is a large, old depression to our right - that is to the north of us - which forms another bowl very similar to the one that we appear to be sitting in. And I can see several ridges and rolling hills of perhaps 35 to 40 feet in height. (They are) obviously very, very old craters that are almost lost...(correcting himself) or, are almost indistinct now (that are) between myself and the skyline to the north - the horizon to the north. It just looks like a series of low hills from this vantage point.

[Jones - "We're looking at the window Hasselblad pictures and Doublet is virtually on your horizon. Actually, I think when you get up on the climb up to Cone - or on the way back - it shows up better in some of those pans."]

[Mitchell - "Yeah, it does."]

[Jones - "So, here, you would have been just picking it out from the rim..."]

[Mitchell - "We could see better than this picture shows, but I'm pretty sure this is the Doublet complex right there."]

109:58:24 McCandless: Houston, Roger. Out.

109:58:27 Mitchell: Okay, Houston. The undulations are far too complex for me to try to describe them right now, without getting in a better vantage point so I can point them out on your map. I'm sure I can do that as soon as I can get a better handle on our location. Let me suffice it to say that I think there is more terrain, more relief here, than we anticipated from looking at the maps.

109:58:56 Shepard: (Punning) There's a hell of a lot of relief inside the cabin, I'll tell you that.

[Jones - (Amid laughter) "You were rolled right seven degrees?"]

[Mitchell - "About 7 or 7.5 degrees."]

[Jones - "So the spacecraft was threatening to throw him down on top of you?"]

[Mitchell - "Well, slightly. Right. But that last remark of his is just a pun on the fact that we're down safe and sound and here we are where we're supposed to be!"]

[Jones - "Now, let's see. You guys were the first ones to set down on a non-mare site."]

[Mitchell - "Right, on so-called Highlands material. Which is, by and large, considerably more rugged, rough terrain than the general mare areas."]

[Jones - "But I take it from this remark that you had not been expecting there to be as much relief."]

[Mitchell - "That's right. The orbital photography up until this point led us to believe that it would be relatively level and smooth. But the amount of relief plagued us from that point on. Navigation turned out to be a real major problem. And when I'm talking about navigation, I'm talking about micronavigation, since our lunar surface plan called for us to know our location within a few yards at any given time. And we found it very, very difficult to find our location within a few yards. Now, since we never went more than a mile and a half from the spacecraft, there was never any danger of being lost or anything, but micronavigation, in order to do good geology and to be able to pinpoint where the rocks came from with respect to each other and with respect to Cone Carter and the LM was very difficult."]

[Jones - "So you simply hadn't been expecting this, what is it, about 30 to 40 feet of up and down."]

[Mitchell - "I think we were probably thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 4 to 5 feet, so that we could at least look over it. But it was quite clear that these things were much taller than our heads. So our field of vision only extended to the next ridge that was as high as we were."]

[Jones - "It would be sort of like being out in the middle of White Sands (National Monument near Alamogordo, New Mexico)?"]

[Mitchell - "Yeah, or any desert. Absolutely. Comparing it to being out in the middle was probably closer. Just this enormous expanse of one sand dune - apparent sand dune - after another."]

[Jones - "That brings up a point. You just said 'apparent sand dune'. Jack Schmitt told me that there had been criticism from some people in the scientific community about the use of descriptive terms - 'it appears like a sand dune would look, although I realize it's not a sand dune'. Buzz apparently said that something looked like mica and, although he wasn't saying it was mica but just that it flashed at him like mica, some people criticized him for that."]

[Mitchell - "Well, I think that's unjustified criticism. Our notion was to try - at least my notion, because I can't speak for anybody else - was to try to convey an impression, an image, a visual understanding of what we were looking at so that they could capture the meaning. And I think that's good communication. If you only have one means of communication, and that's audio, and you're trying to convey a visual picture and you don't have the precise words or descriptions to convey that, then you convey the nearest thing you can think of and say 'it looks like'. And I think that's damn good description, frankly. And I felt confident enough in my abilities as a scientist and an observer that, if a correct term existed and it fit, I would use it. If it didn't fit or it was something slightly different than that, I would use a simile. And that's just the way I operate, and I think it's still appropriate."]

[Jones - "Well, Jack certainly agrees with you and he also told me that he got really mad and chewed those people out."]

[Mitchell, from the 1971 Technical Debrief - "In looking out the window of the LM, I had a very definite impression of the relief. I think we stated several times that the relief was greater than we expected. However, I observed that, when we got on the lunar surface, subsequent to that, that your observation of the relief changes with Sun angle. The Sun wipes out - or seems to smooth out - a lot of relief that you see at certain Sun angles and that you just don't see at other Sun angles. Or, maybe the visor distorts it in some way. But sometimes you see a very good sized crater, a depression just ahead of you. (Then) you look at it at a different angle, and it's just gone. When you turn your head a different way, you don't see it. So, perhaps there's a bit of distortion in the visors. You're never quite sure whether it's visor distortion or whether it's Sun angle or what it is that causes you to see these things or not to see them at a particular point in time."]

[The large boulder visible out Ed's window came to be known as Turtle Rock and can be seen at the upper right in AS14-65-9202. At the end of the second EVA, Ed made a brief excursion out to Turtle Rock and, among other pictures, took AS14-68- 9476. The clock code to which Ed refers gives direction from the spacecraft, with west being 12 o'clock and north being 3 o'clock. Turtle Rock is at CS.8/65 on map LSE-5 and the sunlit face shows up as a white patch just to the east of the grid line.]

110:00:56 McCandless: Ed, Houston...

110:00:57 Mitchell: I think we see lineations that are not...(Listens) Go ahead.

110:01:01 McCandless: Roger. Could you give us a little more description on the near-field craters; that is, the ones that are right in close to the LM?

[Jones - "Bruce's question suggests that somebody in the Backroom is trying to pick out exactly where you are from a high-resolution picture, maybe a Lunar Orbiter picture."]

[Mitchell - "Yeah, that's right. I'm sure they went ahead, from the very beginning and they're trying to say 'All right, where are these guys, where are they exactly?' So they're trying to fit, from our description, where we are. And, as it turns out, that was really not a feasible thing to do because what we were seeing from our three-dimensional perspective, they were trying to look at from an overhead perspective and, unless they were looking through three-dimensional glasses that provided topography, there was no way in hell they could have figured out where we were. Because it was a total surprise, what we were looking at."]

110:02:58 McCandless: All right. Sounds very good, Ed.

[Even knowing where the LM landed, I cannot identify these craters on LSE-5.]

110:05:15 Shepard: Okay, Houston. Referring to the surface map on the forward coordinates, Charlie Peter and 64.9 is a crater, a fairly new crater, which I'm looking at almost directly abeam of the LM. So I would say that our landing point is just about on track, and we're perhaps 10 meters or 20 meters short of the landing site (at CQ/65). The bright crater on the left (west) wall of South Doublet is also very visible to us from this point as it is in the landing surface photographs.

[Starting with the 'bright crater on the left wall of South Doublet, it is not clear what Al means by 'the landing surface photographs'. However, Thomas Schwagmeier has created a comparison (0.3 Mb) between a portion of LROC image M127049821RC and a detail from AS14-66-9238, taken out Al's window after the landing, showing a bright, fresh crater inside the west rim of South Doublet which appears in both the 9238 and the LROC images, as well as a TV still captured at about 2 min 27 seconds into the video clip that starts at 115:39:39. An enhanced detail from Lunar Orbiter image 133_H2, taken in 1967, shows the bright crater and its bowl-shaped neighbor.]

[With regard to the the crater at 'Charlie Peter and 64.9', the LM approached the landing site from the ESE, so a 'surface map on the forward coordinates' would be one that shows the area west of the LM, such as LSE-5. Thomas Schwagmeier has created a comparison between (1) LSE-5, (2) a detail from a deconvolved version of LROC image M127049821RE by Journal Contributor GoneToPlaid, and (3) AS14-65-9210 which Al took out his window before the EVA. Both the plus-Y (north) and minus-Y (south) footpads are clearly visible in the LROC image. Their positions indicate that the LM landed at CQ.3/65.9 rotated 18 degrees clockwise from the EW and NS axes. There are two craters prominent in AS14-65-9210 just to the right of LM thruster. The nearer of the two is a 12-m crater 43 meters southwest of the LM at CP.8/65.4. The more distant of the two is, indeed, the 19-meter crater at CP.0/64.9. They are about 45 meters east and 15 meters north of the intended landing site.]

[Photographs Al took during his LM inspection provide qualitative confirmation of the 18-degree rotation. Photograph AS14-66-9259 was taken from a position north of the minus-Z footpad and shows, among other things, the shadow on the ground of the minus-Z primary strut and, on the eastern side of the engine bell, shadows cast by the north minus-Z secondary strut and adjacent segments of the north minus-Z deployment truss, the cross-over truss assembly, and the north Lock Roller truss. Diagrams on page 76 of Scott Sullivan's invaluable Virtual LM (used with permission from CG Publishing) details the arrangement of the various struts and trusses that make-up each of the four landing-gear assemblies.]

[A labeled version of 9259 details the hardware items and their corresponding shadows. Note that we can follow the primary strut shadow from the minus-Z landing pad toward the engine bell and see where the shadow of the north secondary strut diverges to the right until it encounters the engine bell shadow. The remainder of the north secondary strut shadow is cast on the engine bell.]

[A labeled detail of AS14-66-9268, a photo Al took from south of the minus-Z footpad, shows more of the north secondary strut shadow cast on the engine bell. It also shows clearly that the shadow cast by the primary minus-Z strut passes south of the engine bell.]

[Al took his inspection photos at about 114:53:38. At that time (15:57 UTC on 5 February 1971), the Sun's azimuth/elevation was 89.3/13.7. A labeled portion of Figure 1-3 from the LM Operations Handbook indicating the approximated location on the ground of the shadow of the point of attachment of the secondary struts on the minus-Z primary strut and the point where the inner end of the north secondary strut hits the engine bell. These locations are only approximate because the figure necessarily does not show the 18-degree LM rotation. A second portion of Figure 1-3 gives a view from above, rotated clockwise by 18 degrees. The red circle is a upward projection of the engine bell. The shadow cast by the minus-Z primary strut passes south of the engine bell while the shadow cast by the inner end of the north secondary strut falls on the engine bell at close to the observed location. An inset at the lower left shows that, had the LM not been rotated 18-degrees, the shadow of the inner end of the north secondary strut would have passed well north of the engine bell.]

[Jones - "Obviously, Al's gotten the surface map out from wherever it's been stored."]

[Mitchell - "As I recall, there's a map case on the bulkhead behind one of us. Must be behind Al because the bulkhead behind me had the air-conditioning system (ECS or Environmental Control System), so I think it was on his side. He had a map case, so he's undoubtedly turned around and pulled that out."]

110:06:37 Shepard: That's right.

110:06:39 Mitchell: Houston, we're going to have to get on with our P22 (CSM radar tracking) here very quickly.

110:07:02 McCandless: Roger. Go ahead. (Long Pause)

110:07:49 Shepard: Yes, you could call it the 9:30 position, Houston.

110:07:53 McCandless: Roger. We got you.

[Comm Break]

110:10:42 Mitchell: Roger. Stand by one. (Long Pause)

110:11:37 Shepard: Okay. (Radar return) signal strength is building up; looks like we're going for a lock-on.

110:11:44 McCandless: Roger, out.

110:11:46 Shepard: And the No-Track light is out. (Pause) Okay, we're locked.

[As with the landing radar lights, the rendezvous radar No-track light is on when there is no signal return.]

[Long Comm Break]

110:16:21 Mitchell: Okay. (Long Pause)

[Mitchell - "The DAP is the Digital Autopilot, and it needs the spacecraft weight at lift-off."]

110:16:40 McCandless: Antares, this is Houston. LM weight, 10869. Read back. Over.

110:16:52 Mitchell: Roger. 10869.

110:16:55 McCandless: Roger, out. (Long Pause) When you're ready to copy, Antares, I have your consumables update and also the updated lift-off times for (Command Module) Revs 16 through 19. Over. (Pause)

110:17:49 Mitchell: Okay, Houston. I'm ready to copy lift-off time.

110:17:53 McCandless: Roger, Ed. Updated lift-off times for Rev 16, 112 plus 52 plus 47; Rev 17, 114 plus 51 plus 07; Rev 18, 116 plus 49 plus 28; 118 plus 47 plus 48. Read back. Over.

[These are lift-off times which would permit optimum rendezvous with the Command Module in the event of an emergency. They want to have the times on-board in case comm is lost for some reason. The times are relative to the planned launch from Earth and 40 minutes and 2 seconds should be subtracted to correspond to the Ground Elapsed Time used in this Journal.]

110:18:50 McCandless: Antares, Houston. Readback correct. I have your consumables update when you're ready. Over. (Pause)

110:19:06 Mitchell: Okay. Ready to copy.

110:19:09 McCandless: LM consumables update at a GET (Ground Elapsed Time since the planned time of launch) of 110 (hours) plus 30 (minutes) (109:50 transcript time); RCS (Reaction Control System) : Alpha, 80.0 (percent remaining); Bravo, 77.0. Descent oxygen, 81.6; (percent) ascent oxygen, N/A (not applicable) and 97 (percent) ; descent water, 75.1; ascent water, 98.4, 98.8 (percent); ampere hours (of electric power remaining) descent, 1199; ascent, 572. Over. (Pause)

110:20:00 Mitchell: Rog. Give me the descent water again, please.

110:20:05 McCandless: Descent water, 75.1 percent. Over.

110:20:17 Mitchell: Okay. GET of 110:30 (109:50 transcript time); RCS A is 80.0; B, 77.0; descent O2, 81.6; ascent O2, N/A and 97; descent water, 75.1; ascent water is 98.4, 98.8; ampere hours, 1199 and 572.

110:20:45 McCandless: Antares, this is Houston. Readback is correct. Out.

[Comm Break. During this relatively quiet time, Al and Ed have a light workload.]

[Shepard, from the 1971 Technical Debrief - "We had no problems with the temperature of the cabin or with cooling. Inside the LM, during the periods of low activity, the liquid cooling garment had more than enough cooling for me. At times, I disconnected my (LM) water hose from the suit, because I felt very cool and comfortable."]

[Mitchell, from the 1971 Technical Debrief - "That was generally the case. I always felt a little bit warmer than Al or (Command Module Pilot) Stu (Roosa), so I kept mine (that is, his water hoses) on more than either of them."]

110:22:06 McCandless: Stand by, please.

[Comm Break]

[Jones - "Do you have any comments about the training process for the surface description? All the crews did them."]

[Mitchell - "I developed a personal philosophy of wanting to be rapid, articulate, and so I practiced the art of describing methodically. And, generally, in these descriptions I would start with a line of sight and I'd describe (out along that line of sight). And, then, I'd move the line of sight and I'd describe; I'd move my line of sight and describe. It was a challenge to me personally, because I knew these guys in the Backroom were - particularly the scientists - were eager to do what they were going to do. And I had to be their eyes and ears, particularly their eyes, I guess. So I wanted to do the very best job I could possibly do of passing information as accurately, as succinctly, yet as quickly as I can because the bit stream from the voice isn't nearly as good as the bit stream from the visual. So I considered it to be a personal challenge to be able to do that well. And, looking at the stuff in the comments, I think I did a pretty good job."]

[Jones - "Did you train for that mostly in field exercises?"]

[Mitchell - "Uh-huh."]

[Jones - "You'd go out to a place and practice doing a description."]

[Mitchell - "Right. And we were using radios at one time, with control teams sitting back at some central location while we described. And I think it sharpened our descriptions. Of course, there was always tension between the operations guys and the lunar surface geologists wanting information. Clearly, operations took precedence because they keep breaking in here with updates and getting us ready, because we always had to have the spacecraft configured for emergency lift-off. And all the data had to get read up and made sure it was accurate in the computer. And, as important as anything, all of this read up right here is for backup, in case we lose communications with Houston. We have to have enough data on-board in our charts and in our handwritten notes to be able to fly the spacecraft into orbit without assistance from Houston. So that's where all this updated information is coming from. And we had our checklists such that, with all of this readup, I could just copy down certain numbers and, then, if it came to the point of having to lift-off by ourselves without help from Houston, we had the numbers we'd have to punch into the computer."]

[Shepard, from the 1971 Technical Debrief - "Concerning my impressions of shapes, colors, and shadings of near-lunar surface features, they're all easily recognizable. I think after you work with a few of the geologists that are involved in the flight experiment - which you probably ought to do during pre-flight geology - you have an idea of what kinds of things they like to hear and what kind of things that enable them to get a better mental picture of the general geological structure of the area. You know that you're looking for textures and differences in elevation and ray patterns, and differences in rock sizes and rock populations and these kinds of things. They're all there, easy to see, and easy to recognize."]

[Jones - "How often did you go out in the field during the prime crew training for Apollo 14? Once a month. Less than that? More than that?"]

[Mitchell - "Well, during a certain period, it was at least that much. The training went in phases. In the earlier part of training, we did an enormous amount of field geology. Just to get us up on a learning curve where we could speak the lingo, could coordinate with people, and they got used to us, where we knew our geology well enough that our descriptions made sense." (Ed is probably referring to two trips done in August 1969, to Flagstaff and to Craters of the Moon, Idaho.]

["Then, of course, after that we concentrated on flying the spacecraft; and when I say spacecraft, we're really talking about three spacecraft. The Command Module, the Lunar Module, and the Pressure Suit. So you had to learn how to maneuver and to operate three different spacecraft with all their peculiar systems. That we had to do." (They resumed geology field trips in February and did one about every two month thru to November: February, April, June, August, September, and November. See a compilation by Bill Phinney.)]

["Then, as you got close to the mission itself, the field geology training became less. Then we had the simulated lunar surface at Houston in which we practiced local exercises. And that was more physical. Rather than describing an unknown terrain, we'd go out and refine the checklists, and get the timelines down. And, at that point, I don't recall in the three to four months prior to launch that we did any actual lunar surface exercise - field work like going to a new site. I don't remember when all that stopped. But most of it was focused on the near-term, operational exercise of getting everything together and making sure the timelines and procedures all worked."]

[Jones - "Did you have chilled water in the training suits - some guys wandering around with water supplies that would feed in through the LCG and keep you reasonably cool. Jack thought that started about this time."]

[Mitchell - "I don't think we did that on 14. I think that was 16 before we did that. Yeah, that'd make a hell of a difference."]

[As far as I can tell, Ed is correct in saying that the 16 crew was the first to have chilled water in the training suits. Mike Gentry at the Johnson Space Center in Houston has located training photographs for 16 and 17 (such as A16 photo 71-H-1847) showing the support team walking behind the astronauts carrying the chilled water supply, but none for the other missions. During the Apollo 17 mission review, Jack Schmitt told me that he had become concerned about people getting overheated in the suits and thought that was on Apollo 12. We now think that the issue came up during the time that he and Dick Gordon were training as the backup crew on Apollo 15.]

[Jones - "So it got pretty warm in the suits."]

[Mitchell - "Oh, yeah. When we were out practicing, I'd lose from ten to eleven pounds. It was an exhausting four hours. You'd do a four-hour lunar exercise and you were a mess when you got back. At least I was. Losing ten pounds in sweat was not fun. I'd come back ankle deep in water, just from the sweat. And, of course, you were totally wiped out. There were times when I had muscle cramps so badly after a lunar surface exercise that I could hardly move for a few hours."]

[Jones - "It must have been a pleasure to do the real one."]

[Mitchell - "Oh, yeah. The real one was a piece of cake compared with practicing."]

[Jones - "Was it that nobody had thought about improving the cooling in the training suits?"]

[Mitchell - "Oh, I think we thought about it, but what could you do about it? I mean, we were in full Earth gravity..."]

[Jones - "Lightweight backpack but full-weight suit?"]

[Mitchell - "It wasn't really a lightweight backpack. Well, there were times when they used pseudo-backpacks - just hoses and a dummy backpack. But, by and large on our mission, as we got close to it, we wore the real things - or the Earth versions of the real things - because we wanted to be able to practice reaching for those controls and, also, there's a psychology if you train...It's like - who was it - Socrates speaking with pebbles. If you can learn to articulate with pebbles in your mouth and you get rid of the damn things, it's a lot easier. Well, it's the same thing here. If you could carry all that weight around and do your job, then it had to be easier on the lunar surface. But it was grueling. And the cooling was certainly inadequate."]

[Jones - "You did it pressurized?"]

[Mitchell - "Oh, absolutely."]

[Jones - "Which triggers another question about suit durability. Jack has a feeling that you couldn't have used suits for more than 10 eight-hour EVAs or so before you did a major rehab. Did the training suits get used repeatedly?"]

[Training records supplied to me by Tex Ward, the Apollo 14 Training Coordinator, indicate that Al and Ed each did over 240 hours of training in their suits.]

[Mitchell - "Yeah, but we had suit techs there who were working on the damn things all the time. They were refurbished if they needed to be. One of the worst parts of the whole mission training was that real-live suit training, in a four-and-half-hour stretch. It was just sheer murder. You come in bleeding from the wrist rings and your knees - not so much the ankle - but the wrist and the knees. And elbows."]

[Jones - "Related question. On the lunar surface, Gene was badly blistered on his forefinger and in the area between his forefinger and thumb. And Jack actually had his fingernails lift from repeatedly reaching in the gloves. Did you have any problem with the hands, other than the fatigue of gripping."]

[Mitchell - "Well, I broke one of the constraint cables in my glove. And it was on the second EVA, I think. And the glove, if I relaxed my hand, went like that. (Wrist bent down, severely, toward the forearm, in a Quasimodo fashion.) And it was enormous exertion for me to straighten that glove up and use it like a normal glove. If I relaxed, it just went like that. And, yes, the ends of your fingers...If you fitted your glove such that you really had some control and you had a fineness of feel - and it didn't stretch on you...that's a key, because it's going to stretch and grow, some, during the mission - and you started out with it real tight and your fingers jammed into the gloves, it hurt the end of your fingers. You bruised your fingers. And you kept your fingernails really short, because that was going to be painful. You took a hell of beating on your hands. But where it bothered me most was right on the fingertips. No I didn't get a burn on here like maybe Gene's talking about. Maybe my gloves fit a little differently. But I took a lot of beating on the wrists - a lot of chafing."]

110:23:44 Shepard: Okay. Stand by one. (Pause)

110:23:53 Mitchell: Houston, I'll pick that up for a moment. I'm not going to describe the lineations near-in because the ones near-in may very well be confused with a descent engine pattern. But I will say that further out to the north, I can see lineations that appear to run roughly east-west, but let's say a little bit north of west, south of east, along that line. And it's very fine grained, almost imperceptible; except it does have a little bit of shadow effect, almost like sand-duning but not quite. And I can't really say much more about it until we get out and look at it. They may disappear when we get out there, but they're certainly visible from this viewpoint.

110:25:01 McCandless: Roger, Ed. And we're standing by for your E-memory (Erasable memory) dump (as per Sur 1-18).

110:25:08 Shepard: Okay. Verb 74 coming now. (Long Pause)

110:26:04 McCandless: Antares, Houston.

110:26:09 Shepard: Go ahead.

110:26:11 McCandless: Antares, this is Houston. Based on your description, we estimate your location to be Charlie Papa 0.9 and 65.3. I say again, Charlie Papa 0.9. 65.3. Over.

[They are actually about 50 meters ENE of that location at about CQ0.3/65.9. See a discussion after 110:05:15.]

[Comm Break]

110:28:12 McCandless: Okay. We copy. Understand you would call that crater at your 12 o'clock position?

110:28:23 Mitchell: It's really about 12:30, and probably 130 to 150 feet out.

110:28:31 McCandless: Roger. Out.

110:28:34 Mitchell: Maybe a bit more. Let's say over 150.

[Comm Break. It seems likely that Ed has correctly identified this crater]

110:29:56 Mitchell: Okay, Houston. The computer's yours.

110:29:59 McCandless: Roger. Out.

[Long Comm Break]

[There is nothing in the checklist that is recognizably a gravity measurement, with the possible exception of the step "Except CB(11) IMU OPR - Close". The Inertial Measurements Unit (IMU) is the inertial platform and, by leaving it powered up, they may be letting Houston use the IMU to make some gravity measurements. See the discussion following 110:57:55. The diagrams on Sur 1-19 and 1-21 show the powerdown circuit breaker configuration they will use for most of the rest of their stay on the lunar surface.]

[The dosimeters indicate exposure in hundredths of a rad. The gauges were purposefully not set at zero prior to launch so that there would be no doubt about whose reading was being reported. Total exposures during their 33-1/2 hours on the Moon will be about 30 millirad, a fraction of their nine-day total mission exposure of about 650 millirads. For comparison, the typical exposure resulting from a chest x-ray is about 100 millirads. The average skin dosage for the Apollo 14 crew was about 1150 millirads, which was far higher than that received by any other crew and about twice the dosage received by the Apollo 12 crew. The Apollo 14 exposures were relatively high because their outbound and inbound trajectories took them closer to the core of the Van Allen Belts than any of the other crews.]

110:34:59 Mitchell: As soon as we stop asking questions, we'll start eating.

110:35:03 McCandless: Okay. Munch away!

110:35:11 Shepard: Okay. We'll give you a little verbiage between bites here.

110:35:13 McCandless: No talking with your mouth full.

110:35:19 Shepard: Did you say talking or torquing?

[Comm Break]

110:37:50 Shepard: Go ahead.

110:37:50 McCandless: ...Charlie Romeo 2 and 645, our new estimate of your position is Charlie Quebec 0.5, 65.4. Over.

110:38:06 Shepard: Okay. CQ 5, 65.4.

110:38:10 McCandless: Roger.

[Long Comm Break. They may be 20 to 30 meters further east than this position, although the difference is certainly of no consequence.]

[In the landing video the down-Sun direction is best indicated by boulder shadows. The ground track appears to be roughly 20 degrees north of down-Sun.}

[Mitchell - "Looking directly down-Sun. It was a phenomenon that had been observed, I guess, as far back as Apollo 11. And no one quite understood why things were disappearing in front of them - or, seemed to be disappearing. And they started calling that zero-phase and it was having the Sun angle precisely behind you. And, frankly, I don't recall the physics of it, why that turned out to be so. It was just a fact. Things washed out ahead of you and you just couldn't see it. It's kind of like snow-blindness in a way."]

[Jones - "Part of it is the shadows are disappearing because, with the Sun low behind you and you low to the ground, whatever objects are casting shadows are hiding their own shadows."]

[Mitchell - "Well, that's quite true. That's part of it. But I don't think the total explanation."]

[Jones - "There may also be a fair amount of back scatter."]

[Mitchell - "And it may be the combination of the two."]

[Jones - "And the uniform color."]

[Mitchell - "The uniform color definitely adds to it. Yeah, you're right. On either side of it (that looking for the shadow from a direction either north or south of up-Sun), even with a large object, you'd be looking around the object instead of over the object to the shadow."]

[In this context, 'large' may be at least fist-sized. The process chiefly responsible for the brightness of zero-phase is called Coherent Backscatter.]

[Shepard, from the 1971 Technical Debrief - "Certainly, it's advantageous to land in those low Sun angles. We had practiced at higher ones, and I don't think that a Sun angle of, say, 1 day later - 15 degrees higher - is prohibited. But it could be prohibited from the standpoint of visual acuity if it were combined with looking down-Sun. If you were to come in without the Sun displaced off the approach track and with higher Sun angles, you might have a problem, in earlier assessment of LPD corrections. Jack (?) said we were 14 degrees off (the Sun line) and we had no problem with zero phase. Certainly, any more than that (14 degrees) is fine. Now, whether you can come up with any magic formula that says as long as you're outside of a cone of less than, I don't know, 6 or 7 degrees in elevation and azimuth with respect to zero-phase, it's probably okay. That would be a ballpark guess. I think you'd probably want to look at the zero-phase photographs to figure out what kind of angle you have to have in all directions to describe the cone - the combination of horizontal and vertical angles. You find that, outside of that cone, the eyeball's ability to discern features is good enough."]

110:44:52 Shepard: Almost as soon as I picked out Cone, almost immediately.

110:44:56 McCandless: Roger. Out.

110:45:02 Mitchell: I probably looked out right after Al did and saw the whole pattern. The whole pattern was immediately recognizable to me.

110:45:09 McCandless: Roger. Out. (Long Pause)

[Jones - "On the other missions, there were a lot of crater names assigned to the sites. You've got Doublet and Triplet, and craters named Weird and Old Nameless. But, other than that, few crater names."]

[Mitchell - "And that's probably part of what surprised the hell out of us, is that much of that relief did not show up (on the maps) and, when we got down on the surface there was just a lot more relief and a lot more craters."]

[Jones - "So Doublet and Triplet and Old Nameless were about the only things in the area that one would have tried to name?"]

[Mitchell - "That's right."]

[Jones - "The 12 guys didn't have very many either. The places where they were going had names. There was a Sharp Crater and a Halo Crater."]

[Mitchell - "Well, remember also, the early missions - before 15 - had a smaller radius of action than the guys after us. So there would be a fewer number of significant craters within our range of action. Because we had to walk."]

[Jones - "And the 12 crater names are mostly very descriptive - the exception being Head Crater which was the head of the Snowman pattern. And Weird, I assume, looked a little strange in outline."]

[Mitchell - "We didn't provide those initial names. I don't know where Weird Crater came from. I don't remember why it's called Weird."]

[Detailed, preflight traverse maps of the site contain a few other named craters - Star, Sunrise, Crossroads, Halfway - which are mostly associated with two alternate landing spots. As was the case on Apollo 12, the mission planners picked out backup landing spots in the general area and laid out associated traverses. Planned landing site 1 is at CQ/65. Planned site 2 is at CQ/52, 650 meters west of planned site 1. Site 3 is at DJ/31, 1700 meters west and 900 meters north of planned site 1. Landings at either site 2 or 3 would have put the crew too far from Cone Crater to allow a visit to that crater and the traverses for those sites included visits to the relatively large craters at DF/50 and DZ/33, respectively.]

110:47:31 McCandless: Roger, Al. Sounds like you should have no problem getting your football-sized rocks.

110:47:41 Shepard: No, they are not as plentiful as we might expect. But we'll be able to get at least one on each EVA.

110:47:47 McCandless: Roger.

[Long Comm Break]

[Mitchell - "I was looking at quite a different terrain than he was. And that's because he was looking further away from Cone Crater. Cone Crater was behind us and to the right (north). So he was looking virtually straight out on a radius from Cone Crater. And I was looking across a radius from Cone Crater. And I was seeing a different terrain, a blockier, a more cratered terrain than he was."]

[Jones - "Much more of the ejecta blanket in your direction."]

[Mitchell - "Was visible in my direction. And, whereas he was looking down that ejecta blanket, I was looking across it. I didn't recognize it at the time but, in hearing it now, I know that's part of what the issue is."]

110:54:07 Shepard: Well, we're about eight bites away.

110:54:12 McCandless: Roger, munch away.

110:54:18 Shepard: We should finish up with our lunch here, or whatever meal it is, in about 10 minutes and be pressing on with the EVA-1 Prep.

110:54:28 McCandless: This is Houston. Roger. Out.

[Long Comm Break]

110:57:52 Shepard: (Possibly with a full mouth) Okay; thank you.

110:57:55 McCandless: Roger. Out.

[Jones - "It sounds like they were playing with the inertial platform."]

[Mitchell - "Well, as I heard that (I thought that) one of the things they did with the platform was to torque the platform to calibrate each one of the accelerometers - the accelerometer on each axis - in the gravitational field. And, by comparing that with the known calibration of the accelerometers, they could come up with some sort of estimate of the gravitational field. But that was strictly a Houston-based operation - engineering research operation - where they torqued the platform. Then they returned the platform to its initial configuration that we aligned it in as a result of the star sightings."]

[Jones - "And would you have checked it?"]

[Mitchell - "Oh, yeah. We checked it. We did another one later on. We re-aligned the platform every so many hours. But, by and large, their torquing of it was quite accurate. They were moving tiny steps at a time."]

[Long Comm Break]

111:01:20 Shepard: Okay, Bruce, we'll be doing that momentarily.

111:01:22 McCandless: Roger. No rush.

[Long Comm Break]