Dust

One particular problem with the rover became a serious nuisance for the Apollo 16 and 17 crews. The commanders on those two missions had a habit of storing their geological hammers in pockets sewn onto the shins of their suit legs. Though they could reach down and grab the hammers when needed, they had difficulty seeing them, given that the chest-mounted RCU blocked their view. Unfortunately, as they worked around the rover, both John Young and Gene Cernan caught the right-rear fender extension with the hammer and broke it off.

Young broke his fender partway through their second day and after that, anytime they drove, they and everything on the rover were showered with dust. Unlike the rubber wheels on the MET which tamped down the soil into smooth ruts, the open framework tyres of the rover lilted dust and threw it into rooster tails. Engineers began to worry when the blackened covers began to warm up the batteries and the dust made the radiators less efficient.

Then Cernan did the same thing on his first EVA. He initially tried to use sticky tape to reattach the fender but dust affected the adhesive and it proved to be less than successful. That night, mission control came up with a repair which Young tested in a suit before he passed the details on to Cernan in the morning. In the LM, Cernan took four maps from a book and taped the stiff cards into one large sheet. He took these outside along with two clamps that were normally used to mount little

utility lights onto the protective frame of their alignment telescope. At the rover, the clamps held the card onto the existing fender’s support structure to fashion what was a very successful repair.