Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan, with the Saturn V rocket at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, looks back in the new documentary "The Last Man on the Moon,” opening on Feb. 26, 2016.

Credit: Mark Craig/Last Man on the Moon

As the new documentary "The Last Man on the Moon" opens, the camera pans across a crowd at a rodeo until it finds an older gentleman taking his seat.

The man, clad in a cowboy hat, padded vest and dark blue jeans with a large-buckle belt, doesn't stand out from those around him. Nothing about his appearance suggests he is a member of one of the most exclusive fraternities in all of human history.

In fact, as that scene was shot, only one person, out of the thousands surrounding him, recognized Gene Cernan.

"Just one — the man sitting next to him," said Mark Craig, director of "The Last Man on the Moon," which is openingin select U.S. theaters on Friday (Feb. 26).

Craig's film seeks to address that.

"It is basically the epic tale of one man's part in mankind's greatest adventure with quite a few laughs and tears along the way," Craig told collectSPACE.com. "We don't just dwell on the past, but see plenty of Cernan's life today, and what he shares with us on a personal level is more than any other moonwalker has ever done previously." [Watch the Trailer for "The Last Man on the Moon"]

Cernan, suffice to say, isn't just another face at the rodeo. Though he aspired to and now owns a Texas ranch, a fact that the film not just points out but features, Cernan is one of just 24 men to have flown to the moon, one of just three to have done it twice, and the last out of only 12 astronauts to leave his bootprint on its surface.

A naval aviator, Cernan was chosen as a NASA astronaut in 1963. He flew three times to space as a member of the Gemini 9A and Apollo 10 crews and commander of Apollo 17, the latter the final manned mission to land on the moon in December 1972.

"The Last Man on the Moon" recounts that history, as other documentaries have, but in doing so injects Cernan's own unique perspective on his journey.

"It wasn't just his story, but the way he told it that made a real impact," commented Craig, referencing Cernan's 1998 autobiography, which shares the same title and served as the initial inspiration for the film.

Five years in the making, "Last Man on the Moon" uses on-site shoots to bring Cernan back to the time and places where he made history. He visits the dormant launch pad where he left Earth for the moon, the museums where his spacecraft are on public display, and the Arlington National Cemetery, where some of his fellow astronauts were laid to rest.

"Every one of the film's locations had special significance for both Gene and for us on the small film crew, but in very different ways," Craig recalled. "The derelict launch pad at the Cape certainly stirred some strong feelings for Gene, and that in turn affected us on the crew. And how could a visit to Arlington [cemetery] not leave a powerful and vivid impression?"

The one location the filmmakers could not take Cernan – back to space ("We would love to have taken him back to the Taurus-Littrow valleyon the moon," Craig remarked) – is represented by archival NASA footage, where available, and Hollywood-style recreations, where not.

**Movie poster for the new documentary "The Last Man on the Moon,” opening Feb. 26, 2016.**
**Credit: Mark Stewart Productions**

"Very little footage of Gene's Gemini spacewalk exists. As it was such a defining and dramatic moment in his story, we needed to bring it alive for the audience so that they could see and understand his tremendous difficulties," said Craig of the re-staged EVA. "As for Apollo 10, it was the first time Gene left the planet Earth and headed way out someplace where that few had ever been before. There is some great on board archive footage, but very little of that conveys the vastness and majestic spectacle of space."

"I was partly inspired by Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and wanted to intercut the real footage with the visual effects to keep it feeling big, real and emotional," he described.

Other voices add to that emotion. In addition to Cernan's own recollections, the movie features new interviews with Apollo astronauts Alan Bean, Charlie Duke, Dick Gordon and Jim Lovell, as well as flight directors Gene Kranz and Chris Kraft. Cernan's first wife, Barbara, and current wife, Jan appear, as do his children and grandchildren including his daughter Tracy whose initials he left on the moon.

Although only implied on screen, the film's title, "The Last Man on the Moon," is something Cernan struggles with to this day. While Neil Armstrong will always be the first man, Cernan doesn't relish having carried the title of "last" for so long. It is that message, among others, that Cernan – and Craig – hope the public takes away from the documentary.

"Gene delivers a number of powerful messages in the film. I would rather audiences see and hear these in the context of his story than reveal them here," Craig said. "But I think if you were old enough to remember the age of Apollo you will have some surprisingly strong emotions stirred up. And if you were born after or are too young to remember, then I believe that a major chapter in history will be brought alive by a remarkable individual who was there in the thick of it all."

"We are lucky that he has the courage, wit and honesty to share it with us in such a human way."

"The Last Man on the Moon," produced by Mark Stewart Productions, opens in select U.S. theaters and is available concurrently on video-on-demand services including Apple iTunes, on Friday (Feb. 26). It will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on April 26. For more information, see thelastmanonthemoon.com.

Watch the trailer for "The Last Man on the Moon" at collectSPACE.com.

Find Planet Nine! NASA's Saturn Probe Helps with the Hunt — An artist's illustration of the Cassini spacecraft flying by Saturn's moon Enceladus. Data from Cassini has contributed to a new study that may narrow down the location of a ninth planet beyond Neptune.
**Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech**

The search for a possible ninth planet, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, is being assisted by NASA's Cassini probe, which has been exploring the Saturn system for more than a decade.

The news that a possible ninth planet with a mass 10 times that of Earth could be orbiting in the dark region beyond Neptune lit up the public's imagination in January. The prediction is still just that — a hypothesis, based on modeling, not observation. But the scientists behind the idea say telescope searches of the solar system could confirm (or deny) the prediction within five years.

Now, another group of scientists is showing how the existence of such a planet would affect the motions of the other eight planets. The work relies heavily on measurements taken by the Cassini probe, and aims to narrow down the hunting zone where scientists should point their telescopes as they search for this hidden monster. [The Evidence for 'Planet Nine' in Our Solar System (Gallery)]

**Researchers say an anomaly in the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects points to the existence of an unknown planet orbiting the sun. Here's what we know of this potential "Planet Nine."**
**Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics artist**

The search for Planet Nine

The Cassini probe is a space-based workhorse. It captures breathtaking images of Saturn, makes death-defying dives toward its moons and measures the precise location of Saturn at various times during its orbits around the sun. This latter information is plugged into a model of the solar system that tracks the movement of its largest bodies.

Since the early 1800s, astronomers have tried to use the positions and motions of the known planets to infer the existence of invisible planets, according to a blog post by Mike Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, and one of the scientists who recently predicted the existence of Planet Nine.

In some cases, the influence of one massive body on other massive bodies is obvious: that if the sun were invisible, the orbit of the planets around it would be a dead giveaway that something truly massive was living at the center of the solar system. This technique helped scientists discover Neptune in 1846, and Pluto in 1930.

Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary science at Caltech, predicted the existence of Planet Nine by observing the peculiar orbits of six relatively large bodies in what's known as the Kuiper Belt, a loop of icy, rocky bodies that includes Pluto.

Other scientists have proposed that the peculiar orbits of these Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) could be explained another way: Perhaps there are significantly more small rocky objects orbiting the sun beyond Pluto than scientists currently estimate. In the grand scientific fashion, this trading of alternative possibilities continues. Ultimately, observational evidence should settle the debate, and Brown said that if Planet Nine is out there, scientists could reasonably detect it within five years.

The new research could potentially expedite that search by pointing out regions where Planet Nine could not be orbiting and regions where it could.

Planet X May Be Real - Evidence Mounting For 9th Planet | Video

https://youtu.be/ov4EKOSea48

Measuring Saturn's motion

Agnes Fienga, an astronomer at the Côte d'Azur Observatory and a lead researcher on the new work, along with her colleagues, decided to look not only at how Planet Nine might affect bodies in its immediate area, but how it might influence the motions of the other eight planets. They used a computer model of the solar system called the INPOP planetary ephemerides model, which pulls together more than 150,000 individual measurements of solar system bodies, including more than 200 measurements taken by Cassini over about 10 years, Fienga said. That long-term observation of Saturn's motion is very important in increasing the precision of the model and its ability to pick up on the subtle effect of a possible ninth planet, she said.

Brown and Batygin did not propose a specific path that Planet Nine would take through space but rather a possible range in which it could exist, about 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune is. The path of a planet around the sun includes how far it is from the sun, how oblong its orbit is (instead of a perfect circle) and how tilted its orbit is compared to the plane of the solar system.

Fienga and her colleagues selected an orbit for Planet Nine out of the range suggested by Brown and Batygin, and added it to the INPOP model of the solar system. From there, they determined that the planet could not be in certain regions, because it would have caused perturbations in the motions of the other planets that should have been detectable by observations, like those made by Cassini.

Fienga said she and her colleagues are working to perform the same analysis on more possible orbits of Planet Nine, to further narrow down regions where it could or could not be hiding.

The effect of Planet Nine on the inner planets will be subtle, which is why Fienga and her colleagues could draw conclusions about only roughly half of the planet's orbit — the portion where it would be closest to the sun and, hence, the other planets. If Planet Nine were currently somewhere on the far side of its orbit around the sun, its effect would be too small for the measurements used in the INPOP model to predict.

In the paper, the authors said their work disproves the conclusion of another paper using a similar approach, which suggests that Planet Nine could not lie within 1,000 AU of the sun. (1 AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. Neptune is, on average, about 30 AU from the sun.)

"It's a state-of-the-art calculation and a very clever idea," Batygin told Space.com via email. "It is wonderful to see that members of the community are presenting their own proposals on how to best optimize the observational search for Planet Nine. This is exactly what Mike [Brown] and I hoped for."

Starting this year, the Cassini probe will begin a total of 22 dives through Saturn's ring system, ending with the probe intentionally plummeting into the gas giant's atmosphere in September 2017. Meanwhile, the Juno probe will arrive at Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Measurements by Juno will continue to improve the precision of the INPOP model. Fienga said she and her colleagues "expect to increase the size of the forbidden area thanks to Juno."

The new work is available on the pre-print site arxiv.org, and will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Fienga and her colleagues are not part of the Cassini team or NASA.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.