Touchdown in the Mountains of the Moon

The view out the window was unlike anything any pilot had ever faced: a jagged wall of mountains rising from the lunar plains, and beyond it a winding canyon no human had ever seen up close. On July 30, 1971, Apollo 15 commander David Scott threaded his lunar module through that terrain and set it down in the mountains of the Moon.

Scott and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin touched down at 6:16 p.m. Eastern time, landing the spidery lander Falcon about 1,500 feet from their target beside Hadley Rille — a sinuous lunar valley — at the foot of the Apennine Mountains. Their approach, diving over the range at a 26-degree angle, was the steepest any Apollo crew had flown. Above them, crewmate Al Worden orbited alone in the command module Endeavour.

This was Apollo's fourth Moon landing, but the first of the "J missions" — the long-stay, heavy-science expeditions. The crew would spend nearly 67 hours on the surface, with three moonwalks totaling a record 18 hours and 37 minutes. And parked in a compartment of the lander, folded like a piece of origami, was something no Moon mission had ever carried: a car.

Over the next three days — July 31 and August 1 and 2 — Scott and Irwin drove 17.5 miles across the Hadley-Apennine plain, collected more than 170 pounds of Moon rocks, and deployed a suite of scientific instruments. At a crater called Spur, they picked up the Genesis Rock, a chunk of the Moon's primordial crust some four billion years old. And in front of a television camera, Scott dropped a hammer and a feather at the same instant — both hitting the dust together, just as Galileo had predicted centuries before.

While his crewmates explored below, Worden operated a bank of cameras and sensors in the orbiting command module — and on the way home he stepped outside for the first deep-space spacewalk in history, retrieving film canisters from the spacecraft's exterior.

Apollo 15 turned Moon landings from daring visits into field geology. The samples its crew brought home are still being studied today, and the mission proved that with the right tools, astronauts could do real science on another world. The mountains are still there, the rover tracks are still there — and the little car the crew left behind is parked on the plain where they left it, waiting.

Photo: NASA, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons). This panoramic view shows the Apollo 15 landing site at Hadley-Apennine, with the lunar rover parked at the left.