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
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