Apollo 12 (Spacecraft)

Apollo 12 was the sixth manned mission in the Apollo program and the second to land on the moon. Its crew included Pete Conrad), commander; Richard Gordon, command module pilot; and Alan Bean, lunar module pilot

The Apollo 12 mission landed on an area of the Ocean of Storms that had been visited earlier by several unmanned missions. The International Astronomical Union, recognizing this, christened this region Mare Cognitium (Known Sea). The landing site would thereafter be listed as Statio Cognitium on lunar maps (Conrad and Bean did not formally name their landing site, interestingly enough, though the intended touchdown point was nicknamed Pete''s Parking Lot by Conrad).

The second lunar landing was an exercise in precision targeting. The descent was automatic, with only a few manual corrections by Conrad. Although Apollo 11 had made an almost embarrassingly imprecise landing well outside the designated target area, Apollo 12 succeeded, on November 19, in making a pin-point landing, within walking distance (less than 200 meters) of the Surveyor 3 probe, which had landed on the Moon in April 1967.

Conrad actually landed Intrepid 580 feet short of Pete''s Parking Lot because the planned landing point looked rougher than anticipated during the final approach to touchdown. The planned landing point was a little under 1180 feet from Surveyor 3, a distance that was chosen to eliminate the possibility of lunar dust (being kicked up by Intrepid''s descent engine during landing) from covering Surveyor 3. But the actual touchdown point ¿ 600 feet from Surveyor 3 ¿ did cause a thin film of dust to coat the probe, giving it a light tan hue.

To improve the quality of television pictures from the Moon, a color camera was carried on Apollo 12 (unlike the monochrome camera that was used on Apollo 11. Unfortunately, when Bean carried the camera to the place near the lunar module where it was to be set up, he inadvertently pointed it directly into the Sun, destroying the vidicon tube. Television coverage of this mission was thus terminated almost immediately.

Conrad and Bean removed pieces of the Surveyor 3, to be taken back to Earth for analysis, and took two Moon-walks lasting just under four hours each. They collected rocks and set up equipment that took measurements of the Moon''s seismicity, solar wind flux and magnetic field, and relayed the measurements to Earth. (By accident Bean left several rolls of exposed film on the lunar surface.) Meanwhile Gordon, on board the Yankee Clipper in lunar orbit, took multispectral photographs of the surface.

The lunar plaque attached to the descent stage of Intrepid is unique in that unlike the other lunar plaques, it (a) did not have a depiction of the Earth, and (b) it was textured differently (the other plaques had black lettering on polished stainless steel while the Apollo 12 plaque had the lettering in polished stainless steel while the background was brushed flat).

Intrepid''s ascent stage was dropped (per normal procedures) after Conrad and Bean rejoined Gordon in orbit. It impacted the Moon on 20 November at 3.94 S, 21.20 W. The seismometers the astronauts had left on the lunar surface registered the vibrations for more than an hour.The crew stayed an extra day in lunar orbit taking photographs, for a total lunar stay of thirty-one and a half hours.

The command module and its crew were flawlessly recovered by the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. The ship is now open to the public as a museum in Alameda, California. The command module is displayed at the Virginia Air and Space Center, Hampton, Virginia.