Jim Irwin works at the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the first EVA at the Hadley-Apennine landing site. A portion of the Falcon Lunar Module is on the left. The undeployed
Laser Ranging Retro Reflector LR-3 lies atop the LM’s Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly MESA. Credit: NASA via Retro Space Images
look out there, you see boulders,
but you can’t really tell whether it’s
a large boulder at a great distance
or a small boulder nearby. If it’s very
nearby, it’s easy because you can
run out along the ground and start
calibrating your eyes. If you’re looking close to the LM, you know what
three or four inches are, but as you
start going out, you start losing your
perspective, because there’s nothing
to measure out there. It’s a very interesting phenomenon that everybody
gets fooled on these distances.”
Having said this, Scott added that
the tracks of the rover lent some indication of distance. “Once you have
some tracks,” he said, “you can start
seeing things. As an example, up
on the side of Hadley Delta, looking
back at the Lunar Module, boy, it
was small!”
In the absence of an atmosphere
or the slightest trace of haze, Falcon
appeared far closer and far smaller
than it actually was. “But it gives you
a scale of how far away it is,” Scott
concluded. Even decades later,
Scott expressed frustration with his
inability to describe how it felt: the
ability of his eyes and how well they
transmitted images to his brain was
good on the Moon. Yet there was
nothing on Earth to compare with it.
Heading back towards Falcon
after a little more than two hours, the
two men could take great pride in
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their achievements so far. Yet they
still had a sizeable portion of work to
do before r