Edgar D. Mitchell, who became the sixth man to walk on the moon as a member of NASA’s first lunar mission devoted exclusively to scientific research, died on Thursday at a hospice in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 85.

NASA announced his death, which came one day before the 45th anniversary of his moon landing.

The Apollo 14 flight, launched on Jan. 31, 1971, took Commander Mitchell and his fellow Navy officer, Capt. Alan B. Shepard Jr., to the moon’s Fra Mauro highlands. Captain Shepard had been America’s first man in space 10 years earlier.

Maj. Stuart A. Roosa of the Air Force remained in orbit snapping photographs of potential sites for future missions while awaiting his colleagues’ return in the lunar module.

The first two flights to the moon — the epic Apollo 11 of July 1969 with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 12 four months later — were largely devoted to testing whether men could survive there, albeit for a brief period. Apollo 13’s scheduled moon landing had been aborted by a near-disastrous oxygen tank explosion.