During the Apollo era,
six missions landed on the near side of the Moon,
each with unique stories to tell.
Here we are visiting the Apollo 14 landing site, known as Fra Mauro,
as imaged and mapped by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The base of the Lunar Module Antares can still be seen on the surface.
The orange line is the outbound path that astronauts Al Shepard
and Ed Mitchell took on their second moonwalk.
Their destination was the rim of Cone crater,
about a mile away on the far side of a fairly steep hill.
The trouble was, they couldn't see Cone crater at any
point along the way, and their map
wasn't of high enough resolution to be helpful.
As they hiked, they had to drag a two-wheeled tool caddy
called the Modular Equipment Transporter or MET.
In the low gravity and rough terrain of the Moon,
the MET was always on the verge of tipping over.
It took two and a half hours to reach station C1,
thirty minutes longer than planned,
but they still couldn't see Cone and had to start their return
hike to the Lunar Module.
They didn't know it at the time, but as this LRO
imagery shows, they had actually come
within 150 feet of the crater rim.
The astronauts still managed to achieve their science goal,
sampling the field of material blasted from the lunar surface
when Cone crater was formed.
But they missed the spectacular view
just a few dozen steps from the end of their trail.