NASA
Schmitt, shown here in his official NASA photograph taken in 1971, will visit Washington University in St. Louis the week of May 20 to participate in a round of activities having to do with lunar exploration.
Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, a geologist and Apollo 17 astronaut, will be visiting Washington University in St. Louis the week of May 20 for a round of activities centered on lunar exploration.
On Monday May 20, Schmitt will give a seminar titled “Field geology on another world: Perspectives from the Taurus-Littrow Valley, Moon.” The talk, in Room 201 Crow Hall, begins at 2 pm and is free and open to the public.
“The last Apollo mission to the Moon, Apollo 17, left Earth on December 7, 1972 to land near the southeastern edge of Mare Serenitatis in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow.” Schmitt has written. “For 75 hours, Gene Cernan and I lived and worked in the valley, performing extensive geological studies of the volcanic rocks that partially fill the valley, the boulders that rolled into the valley from the surrounding mountains, and the meteor impact generated soils that cover the valley floor and walls. Successful exploration of Taurus-Littrow capped a six mission investigation of the materials and history of the Moon. At the conclusion of these studies, science had gained a first order understanding of the evolution of the Moon as a planet."
After the seminar, Schmitt will then participate in an “exploration forum,” an informal gathering of students to discuss the future of human space exploration, especially what should or could be done differently next time there is a manned mission to the Moon. Students from earth and planetary sciences and physics will participate, as will the WUSTL RASC-AL team.
The RASCL-AL team is a group of WUSTL undergraduate and graduates students who entered a NASA-sponsored competition called Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts--Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) this year. In this competition students are asked to develop concepts that may provide solutions to design challenges human space exploration currently faces.
The WUSTL team proposed investigating potential landing sites for a lunar outpost at the Moon’s South Pole, from which astronauts could test areas in permanent shadow for volatile compounds that would not have survived exposure to sunlight elsewhere on the Moon. The evidence of these volatiles and the geological characterization of this unexplored region of the Moon might finally answer long-standing questions about the Moon and its origins.
The team has reached the second round of the competition and will travel to Cocoa Beach, Flor., in June to present their proposal to a panel of NASA, Boeing and other industry judges. The exploration forum will give the team a chance to rehearse aspects of the presentation they will later make at the RASC-AL forum.
An eclectic mix of students in engineering, business administration, earth and planetary science, environmental earth science and medicine, the RASC-AL team is advised by Ramesh Agarwal, PhD, the William Palm Professor of mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering.
Tuesday through Thursday Schmitt will be participating in a science team meeting for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Cameras (LROC), hosted by Brad Jolliff, PhD, the Scott Rudolph Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences.
NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying in a low orbit over the Moon, has taken many images that show the traces of manned missions to the Moon. This is the Apollo 17 landing site, where astronauts Harrison "Jack" Schmitt and Gene Cernan deployed the final Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). The trails the astronauts took to either side are still visible, as is the final parking place of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV).
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a spacecraft launched in 2009 that is currently orbiting the Moon in a low orbit that passes over the poles. Its purpose is to prepare for future missions to the Moon by making detailed maps of its surface that can be used to identify safe landing sites, local potential resources and characterize the radiation environment.
The LRO camera’s principal investigator is Mark Robinson, PhD, professor of Earth and space exploration at Arizona State University. The LROC team includes distinguished space scientists from universities across the United States, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Münster in Germany.
At the meeting, the team will discuss spacecraft and camera operations, spacecraft observations (volcanic, tectonic and impact features), future operations, future targets, and image processing.