A brief description of the model and the Apollo 15 site
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From a geologic point of view, the Apollo 15 site was of enormous interest. It had a variety of features to be investigated - and it was also spectacularly beautiful. Scott and Irwin were scheduled to land on the fringe of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains), in a small "bay" surrounded by tall mountains. If, during the Apollo 12 approach, Conrad and Bean thought they were skimming just over the mountain peaks, then this was the real thing. Indeed, in the seconds just before pitchover, as Scott flew the Lunar Module Falcon down through 9000 feet, the summit of 11,000-foot Mount Hadley Delta began to fill his window forward and left; and, on the other side of the spacecraft, Irwin could see the summit of Mount Hadley itself, a round-topped, 14,000-foot peak that dominates the local sky line. And, to add a final touch of grandeur to the scene, out the left window Scott could see a long, winding stretch of Hadley Rille, a mile-wide, V-shaped canyon, that seemed to snake toward him from the southeast.
The model of the Hadley Rille /Apennine Mountains is on a scale of 1:50000, or 1 cm in the model is 500 meters on the moon. The model is 1.2 x 1.2 meters and covers a lunar area of 60 x 60 kilometers. Marker pins in the landscape show the stations during the three EVA's over three days. The Rille is about 1500 meters wide and 300 meters deep, and it is an old, collapsed lava tube. The model is hanging in our dining room, so Im having a trip to the moon quite often.
"We're not looking down as we come over the mountains. We're looking (more or less) straight up until we get down to around 6000 feet and we pitch forward about 30 degrees and, at that point, we could look forward and see where we were. We could see the mountains. I was startled because, out the (left) window, I could see Mt. Hadley Delta which towered about six or seven thousand feet above us. And we never had that type of presentation in the simulator. We just had the front view, not the side view. When we pitched over, I could see the mountain that towered above us out Dave's window. I'm sure it startled Dave, too, because we wanted to know, you know, were we coming in to the right place? Fortunately, the rille was there and it was such a beautiful landmark that we knew we were coming in to the right area. But we'd never had that side view in any of our simulations. It was just the front view. A level plain with the canyon. And it would have been very impressive to be able to look out as we were skimming over the mountains with about 6000-foot terrain clearance. At that speed it would have been really spectacular, like a low-level pass as we came over the mountains down into the valley."