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March 21st, 2026
In his online “Diary of the 12th Man”, Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut, has completed another chapter with a section dedicated to “Origin of Life.”
“I have undertaken a long-running project to write a personal account of the Apollo 17 Mission on which I flew to the Moon as the Lunar Module Pilot and scientist,” explains Schmitt. “This diary also attempts to integrate much of the mission’s scientific results to date with the operations that were necessary to explore the valley of Taurus-Littrow.”
Ronald Wells, Editor-in-Chief, notes that Chapter 13, Section 2, focuses on the origin of life here on our home planet and extends lunar regolith geology to a water-rich Earth.
Artist’s rendering of the LCROSS spacecraft and Centaur separation at the Moon.
Image credit: NASA
“The section presages the possible eventual return of similar regolith material by the Artemis astronauts from lunar south polar areas where H2O has been detected,” Wells notes, for example, by NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) and its Centaur stage that impacted the Moon in October 2009.
That purposely crashed mission was to determine if water-ice exists in a permanently shadowed crater at the Moon’s south pole. NASA formally announced that data from LCROSS “indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water…near the Moon’s south pole.”
Readers can access this chapter and sections in the right sidebar at:
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