The Apollo 15 mission splashed down safely on August 7 despite the loss of one of its three parachutes.
7, Apollo 15 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, about 335 miles north of Honolulu, ending a flight of 12 days, seven hours. The crew was picked up by helicopters from the prime recovery ship, the USS Okinawa, 6.32 miles from the targeted touchdown point.
Apollo 15 was launched on July 26, 1971, and successfully completed the fourth human landing on the Moon. It was the first of the “J series” of Apollo missions, which featured longer stays on the surface and in lunar orbit and more extensive science operations than was possible on the earlier Apollo missions.
The Apollo 13 mission was to be the third lunar landing in the program before an on board explosion forced the mission to circle the Moon without landing. This is the insignia of the Apollo 13 lunar landing mission.
Using an infrared spectrometer, the researchers found water embedded in the Genesis Rock, as well as all the Apollo samples they studied. This implies that the various landing sites of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 each had water present.
You have to purify it so you can drink it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be safe to drink. Lunar regolith [lunar soil] are pretty nasty little particles, and they can cause a lot of respiratory issues.
The Eagle has landed.” At the time of landing, Mission Control thought that the spacecraft had just 17 seconds of fuel left in the descent stage. However, post mission analysis showed that sloshing in the fuel tank during Armstrong's search for a safe landing site caused the fuel gauge to give an inaccurate reading.
the fire that killed Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee.
The Apollo 13 malfunction was caused by an explosion and rupture of oxygen tank no. 2 in the service module. The explosion ruptured a line or damaged a valve in the no. 1 oxygen tank, causing it to lose oxygen rapidly.
But the real horror came when rescuers reached Apollo 1, five minutes after Chaffee's initial shout. The command module, dimly lit by flickering flashlights, was a scene of devastation. Grissom, White and Chaffee were dead. None had suffered life-threatening burns, all having succumbed to asphyxiation.
The second Moonwalk lasted 7 hours, 13 minutes. The astronauts drove the LRV about 7.5 miles, to a maximum distance of about three miles from the LM. During this lunar excursion to Mount Hadley Delta, the astronauts discovered a green crystalline rock later called the “Genesis Rock” because of its presumed antiquity.
The command module of Apollo 13 entered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down on target on April 17 at 1:07 PM Eastern Standard Time. The mission has been referred to as a successful failure, in that all the crew members survived a catastrophic accident.
All told, Apollo 15's moon-roving astronauts spent 18 hours 37 minutes working on the lunar surface, almost the total time spent in lunar orbit by the Apollo 8 crew. The Apollo 15 team set other records as well, including longest time in lunar orbit (about 145 hours) and longest lunar mission (295 hours).
As of April 2023, all three Apollo 8 astronauts remain alive.
Apollo 13 was NASA's third moon-landing mission, but the astronauts never made it to the lunar surface. During the mission's dramatic series of events, an oxygen tank explosion almost 56 hours into the flight forced the crew to abandon all thoughts of reaching the moon.
But a potentially fatal accident on its third lunar surface-bound mission was about to bring it back down to Earth. Apollo 13 (opens in new tab) was surrounded by superstition from the start, the number 13 believed to be unlucky, but NASA wasn't going to let that get in the way of Science.
Update: A typical Apollo blackout lasted about 4 minutes. Due to a shallower re-entry path, Apollo 13's blackout was calculated to last about 4.5 minutes. Flight director Gene Kranz's logs show that it took about 6 minutes to re-establish contact with Apollo 13.
The mission never flew; a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal test at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station Launch Complex 34 on January 27 killed all three crew members—Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee—and destroyed the command module (CM).
Altogether, Apollo 12 spent 3.7 days in lunar orbit, circling the Moon 45 times. The crew returned safely to Earth on November 24, 1969 after a flight of 10 days and 4 hours.
Two Apollo missions were failures: a 1967 cabin fire killed the entire Apollo 1 crew during a ground test in preparation for what was to be the first crewed flight; and the third landing attempt on Apollo 13 was aborted by an oxygen tank explosion en route to the Moon, which disabled the CSM Odyssey's electrical power ...
Roger Launius, the former NASA chief historian and a former senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, agreed, saying, “there is no evidence to support the assertion that he left a bracelet of his daughter on the moon.” Though apparently fiction, the moment is a critical one.
The TLI placed Apollo on a "free-return trajectory" - often illustrated as a figure of eight shape. This course would have harnessed the power of the Moon's gravity to propel the spacecraft back to Earth without the need for more rocket fuel.
Apollo 11 carried the first geologic samples from the Moon back to Earth. In all, astronauts collected 21.6 kilograms of material, including 50 rocks, samples of the fine-grained lunar regolith (or "soil"), and two core tubes that included material from up to 13 centimeters below the Moon's surface.