Apollo 17 Apollo 17 Apollo 17 was the final mission of NASA's Apollo program. Launched at 12:33 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) on December 7, 1972, with a crew made up of Commander Eugene Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, it was the last use of Apollo hardware for its original purpose; after Apollo 17, extra Apollo spacecraft were used in the Skylab and Apollo–Soyuz programs. Apollo 17 was the first night launch of a U.S. human spaceflight and the final manned launch of a Saturn V rocket. It was a "J-type mission" which included three
Tsiolkovskiy (crater) in Mendeleev crater far to the northeast are called Catena Mendeleev, and the row points directly at Tsiolkovsky. For this reason the craters are believed to be secondaries from the Tsiolkovsky impact. This feature was discovered on photographs sent back by the Russian spacecraft Luna 3, and was subsequently imaged by several of the American Lunar Orbiters and then by Apollo astronauts. Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison "Jack" Schmitt and other scientists (Schmitt was the only trained scientist, a geologist, to walk on the moon) strongly advocated Tsiolkovskiy as the landing site of Apollo 17, using small communications satellites deployed from