Official staple-bound NASA manual for the Apollo 17 mission used as the working copy for a Surface Electrical Properties (SEP) team member who assisted CDR Gene Cernan and LMP Harrison Schmitt during their SEP training, and who was later present in a Mission Control ‘backroom’ during the mission’s historic third lunar EVA. The manual, entitled “Apollo 17, Final, Lunar Surface Procedures, Vol. 1: Nominal Plans,” 312 pages, 8 x 10.5, dated November 6, 1972, contains copious ballpoint annotations and diagrams that feature real-time voice communications from the Apollo 17 moonwalkers in regard to the SEP experiment and the lunar geology, in addition to various deviations from the nominal mission timeline. The majority of the handwritten notes and diagrams occur between pages 175 and 215, the nominal timeline section dedicated to EVA 3, in three columns labeled as “Voice Data,” which contains images of the cufflist page worn by the astronauts for the specified timeline segment, “LMP Activities,” and “CDR Activities.”
Highlights are as follows: EVA 1+30 (with sketch): “big boulder / fine grained residuals…light colored inclusion + some dark colored inclusions / white clasts / partially recrystallized fragment breccia / big white clasts in the blue gray / gives appearance of being metamorphosed”; EVA 2+30 (with sketch): “blue gray recrystallized breccia with anorthosite / blue gray rock light streak running length of it”; EVA 3+10 (with sketch): “boulder gray anorthosite / glass coated / residual / crystalline inside / 50-50 mixture of blue gray plagioclase…coarsely crystalline”; EVA 4+10: “station that was thought to be highly volcanic,” with “Station 9” circled; EVA Time 4+20: “mantle dust covers crater walls & rim & inside / bottom of crater has several large blocks / look intensely shattered / bench in walls / rocks badly broken / breccias here with white fragments-not sub floor / mound-composed of gray fragments breccias”; EVA Time 4+30: “Glutonade glass / calphide bomb / aggregate of glass” and “blocks are a gray matrix / fragment breccia + fragments are fine / in mound fragments are much larger / didn’t bring up any sub-floor / kick up a lot of small glass”; EVA Time 4+50: “Skip Station 10”; EVA Time 5+31: “large crater to the west / blocks in walls & on rim up to 3m / San mare complex went through western part”; and EVA Time 6+50: “Farewell speech” and “Surface Gravimeter no go.”
This “Lunar Surface Procedures, Vol. 1: Nominal Plans” manual documents all planned activities for the planned three EVAS of Apollo 17, including geologic background information and detailed explanations of the planned surface experiments. The geologic goal of EVA 3 was to investigate and sample the North Massif and the sculpted hill material to the north of the Taurus-Littrow landing site. The SEP was the main experiment deployed during the third EVA for the purpose of measuring near-surface electrical properties of the lunar material. An MIT pamphlet describing the experiment is included. In very good to fine condition, with a bend to the upper left corners of the front cover and first couple dozen pages, and some toning and foxing to the covers. An astounding behind-the-scenes keepsake related to the final Apollo moon-landing mission and its very last EVA.
Accompanied by a letter of provenance from the SEP team member: "This is to certify that the Apollo 17 Lunar Surface Procedures manual included in this lot belonged to me and that all annotations were made by me while I was a graduate student at the Lunar Science Institute in Houston and part of the SEP team for Apollo 17."
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