BIO
Charles Duke
As the Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 16, Duke became the tenth and youngest person to walk on the Moon at the age of 36, when he landed on its surface in 1972. An engineer, retired Air Force officer and test pilot, Duke has spent over 260 hours in space.
Could you tell us a bit more about how you went about choosing the landing site without crashing?
There is no dark side of the Moon; it’s actually the far side. It rotates once every 28 days. There are two weeks of daylight and two weeks of night on every spot of the lunar surface. Apollo 16 landed with a low Sun angle to give us definition of the lunar surface. If you tried to land at high noon, it was all washed out by sunlight, which meant that you couldn’t see any of the craters and you couldn’t see any of the elevation changes. The landing site was therefore chosen at a very low Sun angle, so that we had all of the shadows to the west. It was early morning during the lunar day at the Apollo landing
