ALFRED M. WORDEN, WHO ORBITED THE MOON IN 1971, DIES
Alfred M. Worden, who orbited the moon in summer 1971, taking sophisticated photographs of the lunar terrain while his fellow astronauts of the Apollo 15 mission roamed its surface in a newly developed four-wheel rover, died in his sleep overnight in Houston, his family announced Wednesday on Twitter. He was 88.
Apollo 15 was NASA’s first moon mission devoted mainly to science. The flight of Apollo 11 in July 1969 had fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s call for America to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s. But the three lunar landings that preceded Apollo 15 had yielded relatively modest insight into the moon’s origin and composition.
Worden, a major in the Air
Force, spent three days in orbit operating a pair of cameras in his space capsule Endeavour.
Those photos provided the sharpest images ever taken of the moon, an achievement that led to the mapping of its rugged terrain. Worden also operated an extensive package of instruments to enhance knowledge of space and the moon itself.
En route home, he released a “subsatellite” — weighing about 78 pounds — designed to orbit the moon for at least a year and radio back data on its gravitational field and other technical information. It was the first time such a space vehicle had been deployed.
He also undertook the first walk in deep space, spending 38 minutes tethered to Endeavour while more than 196,000 miles from Earth as he retrieved canisters of film attached to the skin of the craft.
The other Apollo 15 crewmen — Col. David R. Scott and Lt. Col. James B. Irwin, also Air Force officers — became the seventh and eighth men to land on the moon, having descended in their Lunar Module, Falcon, from the space capsule piloted by Worden. They spent 18½ hours exploring the moon’s surface and covered about 17½ miles in their rover — NASA records — and returned to the capsule for the flight home with 170 pounds of rock and soil samples.
Alfred Merrill Worden was born Feb. 7, 1932, near Jackson, Mich., and grew up on a 10-acre farm that yielded little profit for his parents, Merrill and Helen. One of six children, he took on many farm chores as he grew older but saw no future in that line of work.
“I was going to do anything I could so that I didn’t end up living the rest of my life on a farm,” he told Smithsonian magazine in 2011. “So that kind of motivated me to go to school.”