Description:
Apollo 13 was launched on April 11, 1970, on a scheduled 10-day 
lunar landing mission. The purposes of the mission were (1) to 
explore the hilly upland Fra Mauro region of the moon, (2) to
perform selenological inspection, survey, and sampling of material
in the Fra Mauro formation, (3) to deploy and activate an Apollo
lunar surface experiments package (ALSEP), (4) to further
develop man's capability to work in the lunar  environment, and
(5) to obtain photographs of candidate lunar exploration sites.
These goals were to be carried out from a near-circular lunar
orbit and on the lunar surface at 3 deg S latitude, 17 deg W
longitude. Because of a malfunction in the command service
module, which made the command module (CM) unusable for
the mission, the mission had to be aborted. A faulty thermo-
static switch resultedin the overheating of one of the oxygen
tanks, which ruptured and exploded, damaging the CSM
power and life-support systems. The crew (Commander James
A. Lovell, Jr., CM pilot John L. Swigert, Jr., LM pilot Fred W.
Haise Jr.) transferred to the lunarmodule "Aquarius" and
performed a free-return trajectory, coasting around the Moon
and back to Earth and returning to the CM only prior to
entering the earth's atmosphere. A successful splashdown 
occured in the south Pacific Ocean on 17 April 1970 at 18:08 UT 
(1:08 PM EST). The total mission time was 5 days, 22 hours, 
54 minutes, 41 seconds. Although the planned mission objective