Dallas: A checklist used by Apollo 13 commander James Lovell to make calculations that helped guide the damaged spacecraft home has been sold at auction for USD 388,375.
Dallas-based Heritage Auctions sold the checklist on Wednesday as part of a batch of US space programme artifacts being offered during its "Space Signature Auction."
The checklist was sold to an anonymous collector. The pre-auction estimate for the checklist was USD 25,000.
Michael Riley, senior historian at Heritage, says that without the checklist, the crew would not have known their position in space.
On April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank exploded as the spaceship was four-fifths of the way to the moon. The crew was forced to scrap the moon mission and focus on getting back to Earth alive.
PTI
First Published: Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:20