The Apollo 17 mission was mankind's last manned visit to the Moon. In 2024, if all goes as planned, the first woman will set foot on the moon
48 years ago today, on December 15, 1972, man walked on the moon for the last time. It was Eugene Cernan, an electrical and aeronautics engineer. He was not there alone but with his colleague Harrison Schmitt - astronaut, geologist and later a senator from the state of New Mexico; But Schmitt was the first to board the landing vehicle that returned them to "Apollo 17" and thus missed the title of "the last man on the moon".
Cernan certainly took his time; Just before climbing the ladder he etched his daughter's initials, TDC, into the dust.
Two more famous moonwalkers are of course the space heroes of 1969: the late Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin, who got off the lander right after him. On Earth, millions of viewers sat in front of the television sets that brought the "Apollo 11" mission to their living room, live.
After placing the US flag and a commemorative plaque on the surface of the moon, performing some predetermined scientific tasks and speaking with the then US president, Richard Nixon, Armstrong and Aldrin boarded the lander that took off with them to the "Columbia" command cabin, where Michael Collins was waiting for them , their colleague on the mission, who circled the moon in orbit the whole time. On the moon, the two left the famous flag and several other items, including greetings from 73 country leaders. One of them was the President of the State of Israel Zalman Shazar, who wrote: "From the President of Israel in Jerusalem, most of the peace until without the moon" (as long as there is a moon, there will be peace).
The two astronauts had no idea that on July 21, 1969, when they were standing on the lunar soil, "Luna 15" crashed not far from them - the Soviet spacecraft designed to steal the show from the Americans, maybe even the moon.
Armstrong was indeed the first man on the moon, but there is no doubt that Aldrin, who was born as Edwin, was the extrovert among them - similar to Buzz Lightyear, from the heroes of "Toy Story", which is named after him. According to the mythology of the Aldrin family, Edwin earned the name "Buzz" due to a mispronunciation by his sister, who called him Buzzer instead of Brother.
So what does it have to do with the Technion?
Dr. Buzz Aldrin in his lecture at the Technion
Aldrin - or Dr. Aldrin, since the famous fighter pilot completed his doctorate at MIT in 1963 - visited the Technion on July 26, 2016 as part of the International Space University (ISU). In his lecture in Churchill Hall at the Technion, Aldrin said: "We got an opportunity to land on the moon, and the opportunity became a landmark, an event that changed the history of mankind. When we returned from there we were received as heroes, but the world cheered not for us but for what we represented: conquering the impossible." Aldrin also spoke at length about the future of space exploration and said that "Humanity must not rest on its laurels because it must aim for the next destination, Mars - the island that awaits us in the darkness of space."
"Apollo 17" also has a certain connection to the Technion: the 2016 Harvey Prize for the discovery of the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein. One of Cernan and Schmitt's missions was to discover these gravitational waves, but their gravimeter didn't work. Only more than 40 years later were these waves discovered, and precisely in an experiment conducted on Earth - a discovery that earned the discoverers the Harvey Prize from the Technion and a year later (2017) the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Armstrong and Aldrin, the pioneers of the moon landing, visited it in July 1969; Cernan and Schmitt, the last of the "Yarchists", parted ways with him in December 1972. Two of the four have since passed away - Armstrong in 2012 and Cernan in 2017. Both are no longer young: Schmitt celebrated his 85th birthday this summer and Aldrin will celebrate 91 next month. The restless Aldrin is still involved in the Mars manning mission, which he summarizes in his pictorial style: Get your Ass to Mars! "Mars is the island waiting for us in the darkness of space - so move your ass there, because there we are expected to collide with fate."
The moon has occupied man since the dawn of civilization, and even today many research groups are busy deciphering issues related to its formation and characteristics. One of the leading researchers in this field is Prof. Hagai Peretz from the Faculty of Physics at the Technion, who studies not only "our" moon but also other moons in the solar system. Prof. Peretz's work on the formation of the moon was included in the list of the 100 most interesting scientific discoveries for 2015 by the prestigious Discover magazine. The study published in the journal Nature presented evidence that the moon was not formed from material splashed from the Earth but from material splashed from another space body, "Tia", that hit the Earth.
And we'll end with a news flash in three chapters:
- Although man has not landed on the moon since 1972, the Chinese spacecraft Chang'e 5 is currently staying there. Similar to the Apollo 17 mission, which returned from the moon with more than 100 kilograms of lunar soil, the lander of Chang'e 5 will also bring us samples, but These will be younger - volcanic rocks only 1.3 billion years old that she collected from the vast lava plain "Oceanus Procellarum" (Oceanus Procellarum). If all goes as planned, Chang'e 5 will land the day after tomorrow in the steppes of Mongolia with the fresh goods that will provide a lot of work for astrophysicists and geologists around the world.
- This month, NASA published an update regarding the Artemis program, named after the goddess of the moon and expected to land the first woman on the moon as early as 2024. The program will advance the establishment of Moon Base Alpha on the moon, a permanent base that will serve as a starting point for further journeys throughout the solar system.
- In the same year (2024) the Israeli spacecraft "Beresheit-2" is also expected to land on the moon. SapceIL announced this last week at a ceremony that brought together three Technion graduates: SapceIL CEO Shimon Sharid and Aerospace Industries CEO Boaz Levy, both graduates of the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering, and a graduate of the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Minister of Science and Technology Yizhar Shai. Genesis-2 is expected to split near the moon into three parts: Makfat, which will attack the moon for several years, and two landers that will conduct experiments at two different sites on the moon.
"We went, we went, but they didn't let us in," says Yaakov in the sketch "Aliens" by Esi and Guri. "Why was there a full, blown moon." In 2024, unprecedented activity is expected on the moon, but we can assure you that there will be room for everyone.
Aldrin's full lecture at the Technion in 2016
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