Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell landed in the lunar highlands region of Fra Mauro on Feb. 5, 1971, carrying more than a dozen instruments to measure the new environment: a seismometer, a solar wind detector, a cold cathode ion gauge to measure the almost-nonexistent lunar atmosphere, a laser reflector that Earth scientists could use as a target for their laser-rangefinding experiments, and a plutonium-powered generator.
To get deep rock samples, they also carried an array of grenade launchers which they used to blow away the surface.
Shepard, who made the first suborbital U.S. spaceflight in 1961, also played the first golf on the Moon. He attached a 6-iron to the handle of a rock sample collector. Using a one-handed grip because his suit was too bulky for two hands, he muffed one ball only about 100 feet. On his second try, the ball soared out of sight.
On the trip to the Moon, Mitchell experimented with extrasensory perception by seeing if four people on Earth could guess the number sequences he concentrated on. Mitchell said afterward that two people seemed to exceed random chance in guessing the numbers.
