Apollo 17 investigate the possibility of relatively new volcanic activity in the same area. Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt returned to Earth on December 19 after a 12-day mission. Apollo 17 is the most recent manned Moon landing and the most recent time humans travelled beyond low Earth orbit. It was also the first mission to have no one on board who had been a test pilot; X-15 test pilot Joe Engle lost the lunar module pilot assignment to Schmitt, a geologist. The mission broke several records: the longest moon landing, longest total extravehicular activities (moonwalks), largest lunar sample, and longest time in
Curt Michel NASA scientist-astronaut in June 1965. He resigned from NASA in September 1969 without having being assigned to any spaceflight missions. Michel believed that it was his decision to resign, after it became clear that he would not be given a flight assignment, that motivated the scientific community to demand that his fellow scientist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt be reassigned to Apollo 17 after Schmitt's planned mission on Apollo 18 was cancelled. After his resignation from NASA, Michel returned to teaching and research at Rice, where he also served as chair of the space physics and astronomy department from 1974 to 1979. He