Forty-three years after the Apollo 16 mission was completed, the location of the Apollo 16 booster has been finally located. The method of finding the exact location of the booster was made by studying high-resolution images of NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
"I did finally find the Apollo 16 SIVB crater," Jeff Plescia confirmed, a planetary scientist from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Applied Physics Laboratory. "It looks like the others, but its position was much more poorly defined since the tracking was lost prior to impact."
The "impact" mentioned by Plescia was actually planned by the NASA engineers as a seismic test. This involved crashing the booster into the Moon right after the crew is lifted out successfully and is on its way back to Earth. The booster failed to follow the established route and was lost. The tracking data of the rocket was also destroyed. NASA then had no way of locating the booster's crash site.
The Apollo 16 booster is 17.7 meters long and carried liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen and engine parts. Apollo 16 was the fifth and penultimate NASA Moon-landing mission. It was launched on the April 16, 1972 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. It carried astronauts John Young, Thomas Kenneth "Ken" Mattingly II and Charles Duke. Young and Duke spent 71 hours on the surface of the Moon.
Apollo 16 was the fifth NASA mission to put astronauts on the Moon, according to Science Alert. It launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 16, 1972 carrying astronauts Young, Mattingly and Duke. This was the second "J mission," where astronauts spend a longer time on the surface of the Moon using Extended LM, three LEVAs and a Lunar Roving Vehicle. Young and Duke spent almost three days (71 hours) in the lunar highlands. They performed experiments and were able to collect more than 200 pounds of lunar materials.
