Apollo 12 (Spacecraft)

Variant names

Dates:

Active 1969-11-14

Active 1969-11-24

History notes:

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. 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 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.