Astronaut Gene Cernan was the last person to walk on the moon. The Apollo 17 commander died at the age of 82 on 16th Jan 2017. He was facing ongoing health issues.
On Dec 14, 1972 Cernan became the last of only a dozen men to walk on the moon.
Cernan died less than six weeks after another American space hero, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962.
Cernan guided the lander, named
Challenger, into a lunar valley called
Taurus-Littrow, with Harrison "Jack" Schmitt at his side on Dec. 11, 1972.
Completing their third moon walk on Dec. 14, Schmitt returned to the lunar module and was followed by Cernan.
Eugene A. Cernan was born in 1934 in Chicago and graduated from Indiana's Purdue University in 1956 with a degree in electrical engineering.
He had been a Navy attack pilot and earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering.
NASA selected him in October 1963 as one of 14 members of its third astronaut class.
Cernan was one of only three people to voyage twice to the moon - either to its surface or in moon orbit.
James Lovell and John Young are the others.
In 1973, Cernan became special assistant to the program manager of the Apollo program at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
He retired from NASA three years later.
He worked for a Houston energy firm, Coral Petroleum, then in 1981 began his own aerospace consulting company.
He eventually became chairman of an engineering firm that worked on NASA projects.
He also worked as a network television analyst during shuttle flights in the 1980s.
A documentary about his life,
"The Last Man on the Moon", was released in 2016.
In all, Cernan logged 566 hours and 15 minutes in space, more than 73 hours of them on the moon's surface.
