New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

The last Apollo mission to the moon, Apollo 17, left Earth on December 7, 1972, at 12:40 a.m., to land near the southeastern edge of Mare Serenitatis in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow. For 75 hrs, Gene Cernan and the author lived and worked in that valley. We performed 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 sloping walls. Successful exploration of Taurus-Littrow capped a six mission investigation of the materials and history of the Moon. The determination of optical properties of the lunar surface was one of the fundamental objectives of lunar exploration from the early days of the lunar mapping program, the Ranger and Surveyor unmanned programs, and Apollo exploration. At the conclusion of all these studies, science had gained a first order understanding of the evolution of the Moon as a planet. Humankind also had gained knowledge of new resources in the soils of the Moon that may help solve many energy and environmental problems on Earth and help initiate the exploration and settlement of Mars.