Harrison Schmitt cancelled in September 1970, the community of lunar geologists supporting Apollo felt so strongly about the need to land a professional geologist on the Moon, that they pressured NASA to reassign Schmitt to a remaining flight. As a result, Schmitt was assigned in August 1971 to fly on the last mission, Apollo 17, replacing Joe Engle as Lunar Module Pilot. Schmitt landed on the Moon with commander Gene Cernan in December 1972. Schmitt claims to have taken the photograph of the Earth known as "The Blue Marble", possibly one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence. NASA officially
Fallen Astronaut upright. He also denies it was agreed he would remain anonymous. Both his and Scott's versions of events are given in an article in "Slate" magazine in 2013. During the Apollo 15 mission, near the completion of his work on the lunar surface on August 1, 1971, Scott secretly placed the "Fallen Astronaut" on the Moon, along with a plaque bearing the names of eight American astronauts and six Soviet cosmonauts who had died in service: Scott photographed the memorial, but waited for a post-mission press conference to publicly disclose its existence. Later, he noted that "Sadly, two names are