Washington — US astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to set foot on the moon, died on Monday aged 82, Nasa and his family announced. Cernan was the spacecraft commander of Apollo 17 — his third space flight and the last scheduled US-manned mission to the moon — in December 1972. On what would be the last manned mission to the lunar surface, and Cernan’s second, the crew captured the iconic image of a full view of the earth dubbed "The Blue Marble." "Everything’s three dimension when you look back at the earth in all its splendour, in all its glory, multicolours of the blues of the oceans and whites of the snow and the clouds," the astronaut said of his final mission, in a 2007 interview with Nasa. The footprints Cernan left on the moon’s surface remain visible more than four decades later. "I’d just like to record that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow," he said as he left the moon for the final time.
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