Page "Apollo 16" Paragraph 33

The next morning, flight day five, Young and Duke ate breakfast and began preparations for the first extra-vehicular activity ( EVA ), or moonwalk, of the mission.

After the pair donned and pressurized their spacesuits and depressurized the Lunar Module cabin, John Young climbed out onto the " porch " of the LM, a small platform above the ladder.

Duke handed Young a jettison bag, full of trash, to dispose of on the surface.

Young then lowered the equipment transfer bag ( ETB ), containing equipment for use during the EVA, to the surface.

Young descended the ladder and, upon setting foot on the lunar surface, became the ninth human to walk on the Moon.

Upon stepping onto the surface, Young expressed his sentiments about being there: " There you are: Mysterious and Unknown Descartes.

Highland plains.

Apollo 16 is gonna change your image.

" Charles Duke soon descended the ladder and joined Young on the surface, becoming the tenth and youngest human to walk on the Moon at age 36.

After setting foot on the lunar surface, Duke expressed his excitement, commenting: " Fantastic!

Oh, that first foot on the lunar surface is super, Tony!

" The pair's first task of the moonwalk was to unload the Lunar Roving Vehicle ( LRV ), along with other equipment, from the Lunar Module.

This was done without problems.

On first driving the lunar rover, Young discovered that the rear steering was not working.

He alerted mission control to the problem before setting up the television camera and planting the flag of the United States with Duke.

The day's next task was to deploy the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package ( ALSEP ); while they were parking the lunar rover, on which the TV camera was mounted, to observe the deployment, the rear steering began functioning without explanation.

While deploying a heat-flow experiment that had burned up with the Lunar Module Aquarius on Apollo 13 and had been attempted without success on Apollo 15, a cable was inadvertently snapped after getting caught around Young's foot.

After ALSEP deployment, Young and Duke collected samples in the vicinity.

About four hours after the beginning of EVA-1, the pair mounted the lunar rover and drove to the first geologic stop, Plum Crater, a crater on the rim of Flag Crater, a crater across.

There, at a distance of from the LM, Young and Duke sampled material from the vicinity of Flag Crater, which scientists believed penetrated through the upper regolith layer to the underlying Cayley Formation.

It was there that Young retrieved, at the request of mission control, the largest rock returned by an Apollo mission, a breccia nicknamed Big Muley after mission geology principal investigator Bill Muehlberger.

The next stop of the day was Buster Crater, about from the LM.

There, Duke took pictures of Stone Mountain and South Ray Crater while Young deployed a magnetic field experiment.

At that point, scientists began to reconsider their pre-mission hypothesis that Descartes had been the setting of ancient volcanic activity, as the two astronauts had yet to find any volcanic material.

Following their stop at Buster, Young did a demonstration drive of the lunar rover while Duke filmed with a 16 mm movie camera.