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[i]CERNAN: At 13,000 feet, I had the impression we were level with the top of those mountains. I really did. We pitched over, the needles dropped, pitchover occurred, 64, everything was nominal. Our target point was about a crater diameter short of Camelot. I used LPD frequently. I don't know how many times I used LPD, several clicks back, a couple left, a couple right. I just flew it where I wanted to fly it. I brought it back to an area in the vicinity and to the right of Poppy. As soon as I did that, I just sort of tumbled in on that area and did some more LPDs to finally what I'd call a suitable landing site. That suitable landing site became more evident the closer you got. Initial LPD changes to bring the landing site back east were just gross to change the area. Once I had my area, I started tweaking it up to find what I considered a blockless and level area. I ended up taking over in P66 just a little below 300 feet. The reason I took over is that I wanted to slow our forward velocity down. I did not want to go any farther west, because there were more blocks and more hummocky terrain. As a result of all of our aft LPDing, we ended up (1) with a great deal more fuel than we might have anticipated, between 7 and 9 percent, I believe, and (2) the rate of descent, H-dot, was a little bit higher than normal, because of our steeper descent in the latter phases of the braking and landing. But as far as the CDR was concerned, they were very comfortable rates of descent. The LMP passed them on and said they were a little higher. I knew where we were. I think the most significant part of the final phases from 500 feet down, as far as the CDR was concerned, was that it was extremely comfortable flying the bird, either LPDing in P64, and/or flying manually in P66. I contribute that primarily to the LLTV flying operations. That's why the rates of descent and what have you were just very comfortable. I kept a good rate of descent down through 200 feet, slowed it down a little bit over 100 feet to 1 or 2 feet per second, and then started it on down again. We started to get dust somewhere around 100 feet. SCHMITT: In my window, I didn't see dust until about 60 or 70 feet. CERNAN: The dust layer was so very thin that I could definitely see through it all the way down. It didn't hamper our operations at all. When I was satisfied that that was my landing site, I made sure we had between 1 and 3 feet per second on the crosspointer forward velocity, and to the best of my ability, zero left and right. We continued on down with about 3 feet per second to landing. I saw the shadow come right on up to me, and this is very well done in the simulator. When it passed on under me, I was expecting a blue light. It seemed like it didn't quite come, when the shadow passed on under for just a split second or two. We got the touchdown light. I had planned to say "1 potato, 2" and then push the stop buttton. But I didn't. As soon as we got the touchdown light, I , like most everybody else, hit the stop button. Then things just went "plunk". We plunked down with a relatively good thud, I'd say.[/i] [/B][/QUOTE]
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