Soaring Over Lunar Mt. Hadley

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: Apollo mission planners selected an adventurous landing site for Apollo 15 located on a relatively small patch of lava plains, called "mare" on the moon. This site is nestled between the towering Apennine mountains to the east, attaining heights of 3-5 km (about 10,000-16,000 feet), and the 200-meter-deep (about 650 feet) valley (~650 ft) of Hadley Rille to the west. The experience gained from the successful landings of the preceding Apollo missions afforded m...