This 3-hole punched Apollo 17 LM Data Card Book acquired from the Gene Cernan collection was carried to the lunar surface and used aboard the Apollo 17 lunar module Challenger in the Taurus-Littrow valley of the moon during the last Apollo lunar landing mission in December 1972.
The LM Data Card Book contains templates for recording Pre-Advisory Data (PAD), which was used throughout the flight of the Lunar Module and the stay on the surface. Each card was used as a concise document for making notations on LM operations including LM activation, aborts, rendezvous and docking.
When large lists of PAD numbers were read from Mission Control to Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan while in the LM, they used this book to record the data necessary to carry out a particular maneuver. To simplify the voice transmission of these large lists of numbers and reduce the likelihood of errors, each type of PAD was precisely formatted and aligned for use in Mission Control and this book.
The writing in these pages was all written while on the surface of the moon. The data contained in the data cards can be tracked in the official mission transcripts of the 75-hour stay upon the lunar surface.
The photo of a similar data card book on the LM control panel is from Apollo 11 photo AS11-36-5389H.
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