Apollo 17 Overview

 Previous  Next

Mission Objectives

 

The Apollo 17 mission was the final in a series of J-type missions planned for the Apollo program. These mission are characterized by increased hardware capability, a larger scientific payload, and a battery-powered lunar roving vehicle . The scientific objectives of the Apollo 17 Mission were:

 

•To conduct geological surveying and sampling of material and surface features in pre-selected areas of the Taurus-Littrow region
•To deploy and activate surface experiments

 (a) Heat Flow

 (b) Lunar Seismic Profiling

 (c) Lunar surface gravimeter

 (d) Lunar atmospheric composition experiment

 (e) Lunar ejecta and meteorites experiment

 (f) Surface electrical properties

 (g) Lunar neutron probe

 (h) Traverse gravimeter

 (i) Cosmic Ray Detector

•To conduct lunar-orbital experiments and photography

 

 

Landing Site Selection

 

The landing site for the Apollo 17 is in the Taurus-Littrow region on the south-eastern rim of Mare Serenitatis in the dark deposit between massif units of the southwestern Montes Taurus.  The Taurus-Littrow landing site for Apollo 17 was picked as a location where rocks both older and younger than those previously returned from other Apollo missions and from the Luna 16 and 20 mission might be found.  For this mission, it was hoped that the discovery of younger basaltic rocks, differing in crystallization age from the 3.2 to 3.7 billion years of previously returned mare basalts, would lead to an improved understanding both of volcanism and of the thermal history of the Moon.  Similarly, it was hoped that the discovery of rocks formed earlier than the 3.7 to 4.0 billion years ago would lead to further understanding both of the early lunar crust and of material present at the time of the formation of the Moon.

 

 

Surface Science

 

The basic objective of the Apollo 17 mission was to sample basin-rim highland material and adjacent mare material and investigate the geological evolutionary relationship between these two major units.  In addition to accomplishing this general geological objective, it was also possible to measure directly the thermal neutron flux in the regolith, explore geophysically the subsurface structure of the valley floor, to determine the constituents of the lunar atmosphere and observe their variations during the lunar day and night, and to explore even more of the lunar surface remotely from orbit.

 

Source: Apollo 17 Preliminary Science Report Mission Description