Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin works on the first Lunar Roving Vehicle, before he and fellow astronaut David Scott take it out for a drive. Sloping up behind the lunar module "Falcon" on the left are lunar mountains Hadley Delta and Apennine Front, while about 5 kilometers behind Irwin is St. George Crater. The explorations conducted during the Apollo lunar missions discovered much about our Moon, including that the Moon is made of ancient rock, that it's composition is similar to Earth's, that life is not evident there, that the it underwent a great hot melting in its distant past, that the it has suffered from numerous impacts as shown by its craters, and that the Moon's surface is covered by a layer of rock fragments and dust.
* Photo credit - Apollo 15, David Scott, NASA
* This text was adapted from the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive.
