"Douglas Preston - Tyrannosaur Canyon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Douglas)

described it for Houston: "This is at least a large, blocky rim crater. But even it has the mantle dust material covering
the
(*A11 conversations quoted above are from the original transcripts of the Apollo 17 mission, edited by Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
tftimi Eric M.Jones. Copyright © 1995 by Eric M. Jones.)
rim, partially burying the rocks. And it's down on the floor, as near as I can tell, and on the walls. The crater itself has a
central mound of blocks that's probably fifty meters in diameter-that's a little high-thirty meters in diameter."
Cernan arrived. "Holy Smoley!" he said as he gazed into the visually striking crater.
Schmitt went on. "The rocks are intensely shattered in that area, as are the ones that are on the walls." But as he
looked around for orange soil, he saw none, just a lot of gray lunar rock, much of it in shatter-cones caused by the
force of the impact. It appeared to be an ordinary crater, no more than sixty or seventy million years old. Mission
control was disappointed. Nevertheless, Schmitt and Cernan began collecting samples and putting them in numbered
specimen bags.
"These are very intensely fractured rocks," Schmitt said, handling a specimen. "And it comes off in small flakes.
Let's get this one, because this will be the best oriented one for documentation. Plus, why don't you get that one
you've got in-side there?"
Cernan took a sample and Schmitt picked up another rock in his scoop. "Got a bag?"
"Bag 568."
"That's a corner, I think, off the block that Gene documented here."
Schmitt held out another empty bag. "We'll get another sample that'll be from inside the block."
"I can get it with the tongs real easy," Cernan replied.
Schmitt cast his eye about and saw another sample that he wanted-a curious-looking rock about ten inches long,
shaped like a tablet. "We ought to take that just as is," he told Cernan, even though it was almost too big for a single
sample bag. They picked it up with the tongs.
"Let me hold this end," said Cernan as they tried to maneuver the specimen into the bag. "Let me hold it, and you
put the bag on." Then he paused, looking closely. "Well, see that? See the white fragments in there?" He pointed to a
num-ber of white fragments embedded within the rock.
"Yeah," said Schmitt, examining the spots closely. "You know, it might be that these might be pieces of the
projectile. I don't know. 'Cause it doesn't look like . . . It's not subfloor. Okay. Pin it down."
When the rock was safely bagged, Schmitt asked, "What's the number?"
"It's 480," responded Cernan, reading out the number printed on the side.
Meanwhile, Houston had became impatient with the time being wasted at Van Serg, now that they had determined
there wasn't any orange soil there. They asked Cernan to quit the crater and take some 500mm photographs of North
Massif, while Schmitt did a "radial survey" of the ejecta blanket surrounding Van Serg. By this time, Schmitt and
Cernan had been out exploring for nearly five hours. Schmitt worked slowly, and during the survey his scoop
broke-dust problems again. Houston told him to forget the rest of the radial survey and pre-pare to close out the site.
Back at the Rover, they took one last gravimetric meet-ing and a final soil sample, did the closeout, and returned to the
Lunar Module. The next day, Cernan and Schmitt lifted out of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, be-coming the last human
beings (at least for now) to walk on the moon. Apollo 17 returned to Earth with a splashdown on December 19, 1972.
Lunar Sample 480 joined 842 pounds of other lunar rocks from the Apollo missions at the Lunar Receiving
Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Eight months later, with the end of the Apollo program,
the Lunar Receiving Laboratory was closed and its contents were transferred to a newly built, super-high-tech facility
at the Johnson Space Center, called the Sample Storage and Processing Laboratory or SSPL for short.
Sometime during that eight-month period, before the transfer of the moon rocks to the new SSPL, the rock known
as Lunar Sample 480 vanished. Around the same time, all entries related to its discovery disappeared from the
computer catalog and hard-copy card files.
Today, if you go to the SSPL and make a query to the Lunar Sample Registry Database under the entry LS480, you
will receive the following error message:

QUERY: LS480
?> ILLEGAL NUMBER/NO SUCH NUMBER