Harrison Schmitt credits the image to the entire Apollo 17 crew. While on the Moon's surface, Schmitt — the only geologist in the astronaut corps — collected the rock sample designated Troctolite 76535, which has been called "without doubt the most interesting sample returned from the Moon". Among other distinctions, it is the central piece of evidence suggesting that the Moon once possessed an active magnetic field. As he returned to the Lunar Module before Cernan, Schmitt is the next-to-last person to have walked on the Moon's surface. After the completion of Apollo 17, Schmitt played an active role in documenting the
NASA Astronaut Group 8 NASA Astronaut Group 8 NASA's Astronaut Group 8 was a group of 35 astronauts announced on January 16, 1978. It was the first selection in nine years of astronaut candidates since Group 7 in August 1969, and also included NASA's first female astronauts. Due to the long delay between the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972 and the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, few astronauts from the older groups stayed with NASA. Since then, a new group of candidates has been selected roughly every two years. In Astronaut Group 8, two different astronaut groups were formed: pilots