Apollo 12

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Apollo 12
Mission insignia
Mission statistics
Mission name: Apollo 12
Command Module: CM-108
Service Module: SM-108
Lunar Module: LM-6
Booster: Saturn V SA-507
Call sign: Command module:
Yankee Clipper
Lunar module:
Intrepid
Number of crew members: 3
Launch pad: Kennedy Space Center, Florida
LC 39A
Launch: November 14, 1969
16:22:00 UTC
Lunar landing: November 19, 1969
06:54:35 UTC
3° 0' 44.60" S - 23° 25' 17.65" W
Oceanus Procellarum/Mare Cognitium
(Ocean of Storms/Known Sea)
Lunar EVA length: 1st: 3 h 56 min 03 s
2nd: 3 h 49 min 15 s
Total: 7 h 45 min 18 s
Lunar surface time: 31 h 31 min 11.6 s
Lunar sample mass: 34.35 kg (75.729 lb)
Landing: November 24, 1969
20:58:24 UTC
15°47′S 165°9′W
Duration: 10 d 4 h 36 min 24 s
Number of lunar Orbits: 45
Time in lunar orbit: 88 h 58 min 11.52 s
Apogee: 189.8 km
Perigee: 185 km
Apolune: 257.1 km
Perilune: 115.9 km
Period: 88.16 min
Orbit inclination: 32.54°
Mass: CSM 28,838 kg;
LM 15,235 kg
Crew photo
Apollo 12 crew portrait (L-R: Conrad, Gordon and Bean)
Apollo 12 crew portrait (L-R: Conrad, Gordon and Bean)
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Apollo 12 was the sixth manned mission in the Apollo program and the second to land on the Moon.

Contents

[edit] Crew

*Number in parentheses indicates number of spaceflights by each individual prior to and including this mission.

[edit] Backup crew

[edit] Support crew

[edit] Flight directors

  • Gerald Griffin, Gold team
  • Pete Frank, Orange team
  • Cliff Charlesworth, Green team
  • Milton Windler, Maroon team

[edit] Mission parameters

[edit] LM — CSM docking

[edit] EVAs

[edit] EVA 1 start: November 19, 1969, 11:32:35 UTC

  • Conrad — EVA 1
  • Stepped onto Moon: 11:44:22 UTC
  • LM ingress: 15:27:17 UTC
  • Bean — EVA 1
  • Stepped onto Moon: 12:13:50 UTC
  • LM ingress: 15:14:18 UTC

[edit] EVA 1 end: November 19, 15:28:38 UTC

  • Duration: 3 hours, 56 minutes, 03 seconds

[edit] EVA 2 start: November 20, 1969, 03:54:45 UTC

  • Conrad — EVA 2
  • Stepped onto Moon: 03:59:00 UTC
  • LM ingress: 07:42:00 UTC
  • Bean — EVA 2
  • Stepped onto Moon: 04:06:00 UTC
  • LM ingress: 07:30:00 UTC

[edit] EVA 2 end: November 20, 07:44:00 UTC

  • Duration: 3 hours, 49 minutes, 15 seconds

[edit] Quotes

Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me. — Pete Conrad (somewhat shorter in stature than Armstrong) as he stepped onto the lunar surface for the first time.

[edit] Mission highlights

Alan Bean descends from the LM. (NASA)
Enlarge
Alan Bean descends from the LM. (NASA)
Alan Bean pictured by Pete Conrad (echoed in Bean's helmet) (NASA)
Enlarge
Alan Bean pictured by Pete Conrad (echoed in Bean's helmet) (NASA)
Conrad, Surveyor 3 and the LM Intrepid (NASA)
Enlarge
Conrad, Surveyor 3 and the LM Intrepid (NASA)
Conrad jiggles the Surveyor III craft. (NASA)
Enlarge
Conrad jiggles the Surveyor III craft. (NASA)
photograph of the plaque attached to the Apollo 12 LM
Enlarge
photograph of the plaque attached to the Apollo 12 LM

Shortly after lift-off from Cape Canaveral, the Saturn V rocket body was hit by a bolt of upper-atmosphere lightning. The CM's instruments momentarily went off-line and Mission Control lost the telemetry feeds from the spacecraft for several seconds. When ground control regained telemetry lock with the spacecraft, the feeds were garbled and reported incomplete and possibly inaccurate information. EECOM John Aaron thought that the garbled telemetry might be caused by a malfunction in the launch vehicle's Signal Condition Equipment, since the SCE converted raw instrument data into forms usable by spacecraft instrument displays and ground telemetry equipment (source), and it would have automatically gone off-line in response to the kind of disruption to the spacecraft's electrical systems that a lightning strike would cause (source).

With this in mind, Aaron suggested the crew "Try SCE to aux" – thereby forcing the Signal Condition Equipment to switch over to its auxiliary power source and bringing the SCE back on-line. The command was a relatively obscure one and neither the Flight Director, CAPCOM, or Mission Commander Conrad could immediately recall how to implement it; however, LMP Al Bean remembered that the SCE switch was on his panel because of a training incident a year prior to launch where just such a failure had been simulated. Aaron's quick thinking and Bean's memory were able to salvage what otherwise would have been an aborted mission (at the time of the failure, the flight had just entered abort mode One Bravo). With telemetry restored, the crew proceeded to parking orbit and was able to fully restore and verify the functionality of their spacecraft before re-igniting the S-IVB third stage for trans-lunar injection.

The S-IVB was originally intended to be put into a solar orbit by venting the remaining propellant. However, an extra long burn of the ullage motors meant that venting the remaining propellant in the tank of the S-IVB did not give the rocket stage enough energy to escape the Earth-Moon system and instead the stage ended up in a semi-stable orbit around the Earth after passing by the Moon in November 18, 1969. It finally entered into solar orbit 1971, but returned to Earth orbit (briefly) 31 years later. It was discovered by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung and he gave it the temporary designation J002E3 before it was determined to be an artificial object.

The Apollo 12 mission landed on an area of the Ocean of Storms that had been visited earlier by several unmanned missions (Luna 5, Surveyor 3, and Ranger 7). 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. It is widely claimed that a common bacterium, Streptococcus mitis, was found to have accidentally contaminated the spacecraft's camera prior to launch and survived dormant in this harsh environment for two and a half years [1]. However, this claim is no longer taken seriously by NASA (see Myth of Streptococcus mitis on the moon).

Astronauts Conrad and Bean also 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 1969 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.

Yankee Clipper landed on 24 November 1969, at 20:58 UTC (3:58pm EST, 10:58am HST), approximately 500 miles (800 km) east of American Samoa. During landing, a 16 mm camera dislodged from storage and struck Bean in the forehead, rendering him briefly unconscious. He suffered a mild concussion, and needed six stitches.

The Yankee Clipper is displayed at the Virginia Air and Space Center, Hampton, Virginia. Its recovery ship, the USS Hornet, is now open to the public as a museum in Alameda, California.

[edit] Trivia

  • Alan Bean smuggled a camera-shutter self-timer device on to the mission with the intent of taking a photograph with himself, Pete Conrad and the Surveyor 3 probe in the frame. As the timer was not part of their standard equipment, such an image would have thrown post-mission photo analysts into confusion over how the photo was taken. However, the self-timer was misplaced during the EVA and the plan was never executed.
  • The Apollo 12 backup crew managed to 'insert' into the astronaut's lunar checklist (attached to the wrists of Conrad's and Bean's spacesuits) reduced sized pictures of Playboy centerfolds, thus introducing pornography to the moon for the first time when Conrad and Bean were looking through the lists during their first EVA. The checklists also contained a page of pre-prepared complex geological terminology at the back, to be used for the confusion of the ground crew.
  • Another idea that did not materialize was that Conrad — who loved collecting baseball caps — had a giant one made that would fit over his space helmet. He wanted to wear it during his lunar EVAs, but there was no way that it could be smuggled on board Apollo 12 without its being discovered.
  • The Surveyor 3 camera retrieved by the Apollo 12 astronauts now resides in the Exploring the Planets gallery at the National Air and Space Museum.

[edit] Mission insignia

The Apollo 12 mission patch shows the crew's Navy background. It features a clipper ship arriving at the moon. The ship trails fire and flies the flag of the United States. The mission name APOLLO XII and the crew names are on a wide gold border, with a small blue trim. Blue and gold are traditionally Navy colors. The patch has four stars on it — one each for the three astronauts who flew the mission and one for Clifton Williams. Williams was killed on October 5, 1967, after a mechanical failure caused the controls of his T-38 trainer to stop responding. He had been assigned to the back-up crew for what would be the Apollo 9 mission and would have most likely been assigned as Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 12.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links


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