Apollo 12 40 years ago Today

The Earth Grows Large.

After a three day trip, the earth looks mighty inviting and very, very big. The astronauts would be starting their preparations for reentry and a safe splashdown. So far the mission has been pretty flawless with only about one day left. The astronauts had a possible problem with their parachutes that mission control decided to keep secret as their was nothing that they could do about the problem. It was potentially caused by the lightning strike during takeoff.

On the way back to Earth (after leaving lunar orbit), the crew of Apollo 12 enjoyed the beauty of a solar eclipse witnessed from the unique perspective of having the earth eclipse the sun. This happens regularly in earth orbit, but the astronauts were a long way from earth. The astronauts photographed the eclipse.

Map of Lunar Surface Activities

The S-band antenna and astronaut Conrad at the lunar module

Apollo 12 commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr. works at the Modular Equipment Stowage Assemble (MESA) on the lunar module. In the foreground is the erectable S-band antenna. Behind Conrad is the carrier for the Apollo lunar hand tools. This was near the end of the first moonwalk EVA (extravehicular activity). Conrad is stowing the tools and rock samples that have been collected, Alan Bean is taking panoramic pictures. (Apollo 12, AS12-H-47-6988)\

Photos Courtesy of NASA

Location & Time Information
Date/Time (UT): 1969-11-19 T 14:42
Distance/Range (km): 0.02
Central Latitude/Longitude (deg): -3.01, 23.42
Orbit(s): N/A

Imaging Information
Area or Feature Type: surface image, astronaut
Instrument: Hasselblad Camera
Instrument Resolution (pixels): Film Type – SO 168
Instrument Field of View (deg): 60 mm Focal Length.

Copernicus Crater and the Carpathian Mountains on the Moon

This oblique view of the Moon taken from the Lunar Module shows the 107 km diameter Copernicus crater near the horizon at the center of the frame. Reinhold crater, 42 km across, is in the foreground. The Carpathian mountain range is visible on the horizon at lower left. This area is just to the north of the Apollo 12 landing site. The view is looking northeast. (Apollo 12, AS12-H-47-6875)

Location & Time Information
Date/Time (UT): 1969-11-19
Distance/Range (km): 1000.
Central Latitude/Longitude (deg): 05., 340.
Orbit(s): N/A

Imaging Information
Area or Feature Type: crater, mountain
Instrument: Hasselblad Camera
Instrument Resolution (pixels): Film Type – SO 168
Instrument Field of View (deg): 60 mm Focal Length

Lunar Landing Video

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U32lnvAWtc]

Last TV Coverage with Q&A

224:10:54 Carr: 12, Houston. We’re getting our usual excellent quality picture. [Pause.]

224:11:11 Carr: Looks very good, Pete.

224:11:32 Conrad: Okay, I guess we’s ready if you’re right side up now.

224:11:38 Carr: Real fine, Pete. It looks good. We can see all three of you. We see Al Bean flipping in on the side there. First of all, I’ll read you a little statement; then, we’ll start off with the questions. The questions that you’ll be asked in this news conference have been submitted by newsmen here at the Manned Spacecraft Center who have been covering the flight. Some of the questions their raise will have been answered in your communications with Mission Control but the public at large has not heard them. The questions are being read to you exactly as submitted by the newsmen, and in an order of priority specified by them. So, here comes question number 1. If you had this mission to fly over again or were planning another with your present knowledge, what would you do differently and what equipment would you add or modify, specifically in connection with the EVA? Over.

224:12:36 Conrad: Well, I think we’d work over all the tools and –the tool carrier and the bags. I think we’d work over just about all of it. I think it was very good, and I think it operated very well, seeing we’d never been there before and attempted to do that kind of work. Now that we’ve done it, I think we can make some improvements on it. Now, I’ll let Al talk about it.

224:13:00 Bean: I think that you about hit it, Pete. I think the PLSS’s and the OPS’s and the suits, as far as the operation of both EVA’s were, you couldn’t ask for anything better than that. The tools are going to need a little work.

224:13:17 Carr: Okay, troops, here comes…

224:13:18 Gordon: [Garble] – Hey, Jerry?

224:13:21 Carr: Go ahead.

224:13:22 Gordon: If I had it to do over again, I’d of – I’d of wagered a little more with all those people who said I would never be able to find the LM on the lunar surface. In fact, if I’d of been that smart, I’d have bet them I’d find the Surveyor also and I’d retire.

224:13:37 Carr: [Laughter] Roger, Dick. Okay, here comes question number 2. Was there some confusion about something you said yesterday about the launch into the thunder-clouds? Would you or would you not consent to launching under those conditions again?

224:13:55 Conrad: I’d go again.

224:13:58 Gordon: We made it this time; why couldn’t we do it again?

224:14:01 Bean: Concur.

224:14:04 Carr: Okay, troops. Question number 3. Aside from the lightning, what gave you your most apprehensive moment, if any, either before the lunar landing, during your time on the Moon, or afterwards? And if you never had an apprehensive moment, was there ever a time when you may have been a little bit concerned over what was going on?

224:14:31 Bean: Well – how about from lift-off all the way through to a GET of 224 hours and 14 minutes and 30 seconds?

224:14:38 Conrad: Yes, that’s a pretty good answer. I think – I think clearly all three of us were a lot calmer through most of the flight than I thought we’d be or any of us thought we’d be, except I think both Al and I were a little hit nervous about ascent. After [garble] you only got to have one engine. I think we were a little tweaked there right – towards T-0 on lift-off through the ascent stage; but once we got going and it was going so well, that – really didn’t concern either one of us after that.

224:15:15 Bean: The only time I can think of is – one time when we were walking around on the lunar surface on the second EVA, I felt my suit pressure kind of pulse. And that PLSS is so good that you never feel any change in pressure as you walk around or move around or jump up and down or anything else. This one time it did, and I took a quick glance at my suit pressure gage because I thought maybe it was building up or decreasing; I had some sort of problem where I would have had to use the OPS, but it wasn’t the gage. It was just right, and that was the end of it. The only time it occurred either, but that gave me quite pulse there for a second.

224:15:54 Carr: Roger.

224:15:55 Gordon: Well, I think when we – switched to the Command Module side of the house, Jerry. Everything has gone according to plans and as expected. I think that the best thing about my end of the operation is that there have not been any surprises, and I’d like to keep it that way.

224:16:14 Carr: Yes, that’s kind of nice, no surprises. Pete, now questions number 4 is for you. Out there on the Moon, you sounded happy, even euphoric. Some people think that maybe you were on an oxygen high. Were you? And for both you and Al, how did it feel subjectively to be out there?

224:16:36 Conrad: Well, I was very happy, but I wasn’t on any oxygen high. I was very happy because all the work that we had put into that EVA was beginning to pay off; and once we got over the initial stumbling block of the one little problem we had getting the fuel cask going, why I was quite happy because we were on the time line; everything was going the way we thought it was going to go; and I was just having a ball because it was much easier than all the one-g practice we’d done learning how to do that.

224:17:14 Bean: Yes. You’re asking about how it feels – I think for about the first l0 minutes that you’re out, at least in my case, you find that it’s not as hard as you think it’s going to be to move around, and you’re pretty happy about that. But you could sense that first l0 minutes you still want to be careful and you don’t want to overextend yourself, so you’re -you’re sort of excited trying to get up to speed, get your balance in good shape, and get your movements in good shape so you can start doing the work. And once the first l0 minutes is over and you sort of realize that you now know how to hold your balance and you now aren’t going to fall down and everything is working real well, I think right then you start getting down to the operational part of it and after that you – you just press on and get the job done, like Pete said.

224:18:00 Conrad: I was in a good humor to start with seeing we had landed next to the Surveyor. That started the thing off right.

224:18:10 Carr: Okay. Question number 5. On Apollo 11, Armstrong and Aldrin had to curl up in the corners of the LM to sleep and complained that they were cold and uncomfortable. You had hammocks and blankets. How did you sleep? And, on the subject of sleep, a lot of people are wondering whether you dreamed there on the Moon.

224:18:32 Conrad: Well, let’s take them all in order. In the first place, we didn’t have any blankets. We had the hammocks. And, as you may or may not remember, about a week before the flight, we found a problem on the boot of my backup suit and all four of our suits were sent back to the factory and the boots were replaced. And, in the process of doing that, the suit had to be re-rigged when we came back – when they came back to the Cape – and I had to fit my suit without the liquid cooled garment because both the flight ones were already packed, and you can’t put a non-flight one in a flight suit. And I had – the legs got a little bit too tight, so in my hammock that night I didn’t want to take my suit off; it was too dirty in there. In my hammock, I was very uncomfortable; my shoulders – the suit was pressing on the bottom of my feet and my shoulders and it sounds funny but even bending your knees or anything you can’t – you can’t get rid of that. If the suit’s too short, it’s too short; it was about a half an inch too short. So I beared with it most of the night and I only slept maybe 4 and 1/2 hours, mostly on account of that, and then Al, very kindly, the next morning, let my suit out for me and – which took him about an hour, so that – that’s about how I spent my night. And as for the dreams, I don’t dream normally anyhow, that I can remember, and I didn’t dream there.

224:20:12 Bean: I didn’t – I didn’t dream either, and I don’t know; I didn’t sleep too good on the Moon. Not because we were cold or hot, because we weren’t; we had both the liquid cooled garment on and we had air running through our suit. And so, if we got a little warm, we could either turn on the water pump and get a little cool water running through your suit, which would rapidly cool you down, or turn on the air and get a little air running through your suit to cool you down. So using those two controls, I think Pete and I stayed just about the temperature we wanted to stay. And the hammocks were very comfortable; it’s interesting that if you rig them on the Earth and they’re pretty long and you say – boy, when you get in that, it’s really going to sag but when you get on the Moon and you only weigh about 30 or 35 pounds and you get in those hammocks, I was looking at Pete up on his; you don’t hardly sag a bit. You just kind of lay there almost horizontal. A real comfortable place to sleep.

224:21:10 Carr: Roger, Al. And you didn’t dream either, huh?

224:21:14 Bean: No, I didn’t dream a bit. I woke up and went back to sleep a number of times. Another interesting thing, people have worried about the amount of sound in the LM bothering you. It’s fairly noisy in there and there s a couple of pumps that change frequency every once in a while; but, all in all, I don’t think that was any hindrance to sleep, do you, Pete?

224:21:34 Conrad: No.

224:21:36 Bean: The one-sixth g is nice; it just keeps – it pushes you down enough so that you feel pressure on your back or your side or wherever you’re laying but it’s not enough to really give you any pressure points in the suit. I think one-sixth-g is nicer than either zero-g to sleep in or one-g to sleep in. It – It’s a – It’s a good happy medium. It’s pleasant.

224:22:00 Carr: Roger. Question number 6 is for Dick Gordon. Dick, how does it feel to be alone for a day and a half in orbit around the Moon? And what were you able to observe of Pete’s and Al’s activities on the surface? Also when the LM was crash landed after rendezvous on Friday, were any of you able to see the impact.

224:22:24 Gordon: Well, it’s a little hard – to – to really express how one would feel, being with Pete and Al for 4 days on the way out there, being very close through all that training, and then being left alone to tend the Command Module in lunar orbit while they’re down there for some 32 hours of the lunar stay. I’d thought about this beforehand – what it would really be like to be completely alone on the back side of the Moon, no contact with any other human being; but, surprisingly enough, the activities were such that I was awful busy during my waking hours; didn’t really have time to dwell upon that; and to be perfectly frank, so blasted tired at the end of the day, that I could hardly get to bed fast enough to get enough sleep to carry on the next day’s activities which were busy in themselves because of the photographic requirements that were levied on me while in lunar orbit, while Pete and Al were working on the surface. I never did observe them personally on the surface, although I did see the LM through the optics, which are right behind us; and I also saw the Surveyor in the crater. I saw both of these objects twice on two different passes. On one pass, I put the camera on the sextant. Hopefully, I’ll have pictures of that so my doubting friends will no longer doubt. All in all, I think that kind of describes the activities that I went through while Pete and Al were down on the lunar surface. The last part of your question, Jerry, I forgot was. Would you repeat it again?

224:24:07 Carr: That’s about the crash landing, Dick. Did you see it go in?

224:24:12 Gordon: No. None of us saw it go in. After we separated, I tracked the LM for a considerable length of time in the optics, and thought I had a pretty good state vector so that the Auto optics would track the LM automatically. Therefore, I put the camera, the same camera on the sextant right here behind me, hoping that it would automatically track the LM into the lunar surface. I don’t know whether we were successful with that or not. I have some doubts about that. Certainly we – none of us saw it with our naked eye.

224:24:50 Carr: Roger, Dick. Thanks. Question number 7. You mentioned during the EVA finding three kinds of soil. Will you give a brief description of each, its color, its texture, and so forth, and discuss whatever problems you had in handling all the different kinds of lunar material.

224:25:10 Conrad: Well, when we say three different kinds of soil yesterday, that was a – I guess what I want to say a subjective thing in that the colors were all the same. It appeared that some soil was firmer than other soil in the manner in which we sunk into it. And the finer soil would be – the softer soil that we sank deeper in was of a finer grain. This was over towards the very extreme end of our traverse, over at the sharp crater, which is about as far away as we could get from the LM. And now, we have samples – in the sample bags – some of these types of soil. When I say three different kinds of soil, the medium-textured one was where we landed on one side of the Surveyor crater; and, over on the other side when we went down to get to the Surveyor, we found the ground was – I’d say considerably more firmer. It appeared to be firmer ground, not quite as – we didn’t sink in quite as much as we did over working around the LM. Then, when we got over to the sharp crater, which was the far end, that’s the softest ground; we sank in the deepest there. Do you have anything to add to that, Al?

224:26:33 Bean: No, you covered it. They asked about the color.

224:26:36 Bean: One of the real difficult things about the whole EVA, in the geology part of it, was the fact there didn’t appear to be any difference in color among either the rocks or the soils. They all looked about the same. The first day, to me, they all looked sort of a dull gray And I think I described most of the rocks that way, as a dull gray, and the soil’s a dull gray, and this sort of thing’s a dull gray. And if you look real close, of course, you could see maybe…

224:27:09 Carr: Apollo 12, Houston. Break, break. You’ll have to go Manual on your High Gain antenna. We just lost you.

224:27:17 Conrad: Okay. [Long pause.]

224:27:31 Carr: Okay. We’re getting you back now, Pete. Press on.

224:27:39 Bean: Well, anyway, all the – the rocks, the soil looks sort of a gray, and if you look real close maybe you can find a white rock now and then or you could maybe disturb something and get a little darker gray; but generally, they were gray. The second day we went out, the same thing that looked gray to us the first day, started looking, at least to me, started looking a sort of a brown, a dark brown, or a tannish brown; and it was really one of the most interesting things of the EV – of the lunar surface operations, was how much that color could change just with a 7-degree or so Sun-angle change and how everthing there changes color with it. In fact, when we came upon the Surveyor, you’ll recall, it was gray, I mean, it was brown. We saw it the second day; it was brown, and we asked you if it had been painted that way and you said no, it hadn’t been; it had really been white. When we got up next to it, we discovered that sure enough it looked brown, and the coating on it was the same brown as the soil. Now, I I wouldn’t be a bit surprised when we get all those parts back to Houston, they don’t turn out to be, you know, under the Earth light and light of the laboratory, they turn out to be kind of a dark gray, again. It’s going to make geology quite a bit more difficult than we see it on Earth because the color cues just aren’t going to be there; you’re going to have to look for texture and fracture and luster and a lot of other things that will aid you in determining differences in rocks and minerals.

224:29:16 Carr: Roger. Let’s move on to the next question here. It’s number 8. Were the Moon’s color, texture, and general appearance, as seen from above, as you expected them to be? And is there any place on Earth you know of that looks like the Ocean of Storms?

224:29:38 Gordon: No. I can’t think that there is. It reminds me of desert areas. You might be able to find appearance like that in some deserts, particularly the back side of the Moon, which is a lot more beat up than the front side. As far as the Ocean of Storms, I guess there really isn’t any corollary, any one place on Earth that we can recall, at least.

224:30:08 Carr: Okay. The next question is for Pete. Pete, everybody’s wondering about the fall you took on the Moon. Was it accidental or on purpose? And how did it feel to fall in the weak lunar gravity and could you have recovered your footing if Al Bean hadn’t been there to help you?

224:30:32 Conrad: Yes. No, I was – I didn’t fall on purpose. I was trying to pick up something, and I was just standing next to Al. It was a rock that was too big to go in the tongs and we sort of had a little game we played there of leaning on the tongs and sort of doing a one-armed jabber-do all stretched out, and I just sort of rolled over on my side down there on the ground and Al, before I got all the way down, just gave me a shove back up again. I don’t think it’ll be any problem. The business of falling against a rock and cutting your suit or something; you don’t fall that fast. You just wouldn’t hit a rock hard enough, do you think, Al?

224:31:19 Bean: No, not only that, you’re talking about not falling fast: When you start to fall, and you lose your balance at first sort of quickly, particularly if you ever try to back up, because the ground is uneven and you step in holes or over rocks. You fall so slowly that it gives you plenty of time almost to turn around, or catch your footing before you actually get low enough down before it’s too late. I can re-call a number of times when I lost my balance. If I’d lost my balance that much on Earth, I would have probably fallen down. But on the Moon, because you start moving so slowly, you’re usually able to spin around and bend your knees and recover. And, like you say, Pete, you’re falling so slow that you can usually catch yourself or roll over or something.

224:32:02 Conrad: I think that’s another thing. I think – and I saw Al do this two or three times also, in trying to bend over to get something, we’d start to fall over and you fall so slowly that you just start moving out and you just keep moving until your feet come back up under you again. So it’s not that easy to fall over up there, for that matter. And I really don’t think there’s any problem.

224:32:30 Carr: Roger. Question number 10 I think you’ve pretty well answered, but I’ll read it anyway and you can add any more thoughts you might have to it. While you were inspecting the Surveyor spacecraft down there in the crater, you commented about changes in its appearance, the white part seemed to turn tan and so on. Will you discuss this further and give us any impressions or conclusions you may have about what caused these changes?

224:32:54 Conrad: Well, this brown color is definitely some lunar dust that’s on it. And it was evenly distributed all the way around it, so I don’t think it’s dust that we blew on with the – with the LM when we landed. I think it’s accumulated there; it wasn’t that easy to wipe off. And the other thing I think that was most apparent to Al and I were in cutting the tubes; in practice, we had, and I’m going to have to check this, hut theoretically we had the same aluminum tubing as the struts were on the Surveyor and the tubing appeared much more brittle and much easier to cut up there, so I suspect that some crystallization or something had happened to the metal in the 31 months that it was sitting there. And the other thing was that we noticed that the wire bundles that we had to cut, the insulation had gotten very dry and very hard and also very brittle. And I think that’s about it. Can you think of anything else, Al?

224:33:55 Bean: No. I think you covered it, Pete.

224:33:58 Carr: Okay, here comes number 11. Do you think that future EVA’s can be extended beyond the 4-hour limit? Or do you believe the number of 4-hour EVA’s should be increased in order to get more exploration done on each mission?

224:34:13 Conrad: No, I think you ought to go a longer time on each EVA. We felt badly, sort of, that we got shut off the other day, although we didn’t have the data in real time, nor did we have the agreement with the ground, that we weren’t going to go past the 4 hours. But we had 6 hours worth of consumables and we’d gotten out early on the second EVA. And as far as being tired or anything, we weren’t tired; we were – We could have kept on going: we hustled to get back just to make our 4-hour deadline. And I think that the big problem is getting suited up and getting unsuited when you get back in. Doing the work outside is easy. Once you step down the ladder, you’re on your way. And I think what you should do is get a long-term PLSS. And, if you have a 3-day LM, you have a PLSS that’ll stay out for 8 or 9 hours and some way to give the guy a drink of water and maybe a shot of food. And he can sit down and take a little siesta out there for a half an hour in the middle of it. And he can do an 8-hour day work out there. And that’s the big, the big thing is getting it all on and getting out and getting it all off and putting it away when you get back in.

224:35:26 Gordon: I think there’s another significant problem Pete didn’t mention. That’s the amount of dirt that you bring back in the spacecraft with you. Both Pete and Al, although they had been in the LM for a considerable length of time before they got back into the Command Module, still brought back a tremendous, just a tremendous amount of dirt and dust in their clothing and on their persons, and I think if you’re going to work in that environment for any length of time, you’re really going to have to tackle this problem of keeping clean.

224:35:56 Carr: Roger. Thank you. That was a good one. Question number 12. For future lunar explorations, is a geologist a desirable member of the crew? And what sort of surface transportation would you recommend?

224:36:12 Conrad: Well, you can go pretty good on your feet; I can tell you that right now. I guess we ran almost a mile out there without giving it too much thought. Certainly, I think a geologist should go on the trip. I’ll tell you one thing, though, it took every bit of knowledge I had getting that baby down there in the right place. That was no easy task and I think – As a matter of fact, we were discussing that earlier today; I’m a big advocate of the LLTV. I think that was a tremendous help to me, and I – Certainly, that’s been my profession and it took everything I had to get that LM down in one piece. I think that we got some things to work out on that that’ll make those tasks easier, and I think that the idea is to get the transportation system worked out and then take the necessary people to go. There’s no doubt that a geologist can do a better job than I can; I’m not a geologist.

224:37:19 Carr: Roger, Pete. This is the last question now. Millions of people who stayed up late one night last week are wondering what happened to that TV camera, anyway.

224:37:31 Conrad: Well, Jerry, we really don’t know what happened to it. All I know is you told me you were getting a picture and then I didn’t pay any more attention to it until I herd you talking with Al, and we don’t know what happened to the camera; but we have it on board. We brought it back with us., and whatever is wrong with it, they’ll find out and have it fixed so that they have good TV for 13.

224:37:55 Carr: Roger, Pete. That covers all the questions we have. You got any general-nature little goodies you’d like to show us or talk about?

224:38:04 Conrad: Well, I just – is – is George Low down there, by any chance?

224:38:14 Carr: Pete, he doesn’t seem to be in the MOCR or in the viewing room, but we know he’s listening.

224:38:21 Conrad: Okay, well, he could probably see it later, but he sent us a letter about not having a certain passenger aboard the spacecraft; and, unfortunately, he is aboard the spacecraft, and we just wanted to show it to George so that he could write the proper letter to allow him to have made the flight.

224:38:46 Bean: I’ve got something to say. Pete, Dick, and I spent…

224:38:50 Carr: Roger. You found him, huh?

224:38:54 Conrad: We sure did. He was in the food locker.

224:39:02 Carr: Is he fat?

224:39:05 Conrad: He’s very fat.

224:39:07 Carr: Go ahead, Al.

224:39:10 Bean: Pete, Dick, and I spent a couple of years getting ready for this mission, both backing up Apollo 9 and working on this one. We spent a lot of time sitting around thinking about what our chances were of actually getting to the Moon and landing there and coming back home. Every one of these space missions boils down, as you know, Jerry, boils down to about three big things. One, you got to have trained people that operate the spacecraft and that operate on Earth as flight controllers, and we felt pretty good about that. We’ve been training hard; we’ve worked with the flight controllers and we knew they had. You got to have a good set of procedures to work by and people like Bill Kindle and the men that work with him; they’ve spent many long hours and a heck of a lot of effort developing them. So, we were pretty happy about that too. And that leaves the hardware; the machinery that’s got to work; the Saturn V and the Command Module and the LM, and that was our sort of big unknown. We knew there were millions and millions of parts in here, and it doesn’t take very many parts to go bad before you can – you can abort a lunar mission. It’s a long chain of events, and any one of them can shoot you down and cause you to come back home early without making it. We, of course, couldn’t walk around and cheek all the parts on any of these things; we don’t ever know that much about it. We did know the people that worked on it, though, people like Jim Harrington at the Cape, and Buzz Hello there, and Chuck Tringali, our team leader, and a lot of others that I didn’t mention right then. We kind of felt pretty good about the fact that they were handling the gear. We’re on the way home now; we’ll be back tomorrow, and every bit of this machinery has worked beautifully. We’ve had a couple of small failures, but none of the equipment that we worried about has shown anything but perfect performance. The fuel cells, for example, are just perking along, just as beautifully as they can, been putting out 20 amps apiece and holding their own just perfectly. I think this is a fantastic tribute to the people that designed this equipment, and the people that built it, and the people down at the Cape that checked it out. I’m pretty proud of the Apollo 12 mission. We got everything we were supposed to do done. I hope that all of those people there, that had anything to do with this hardware, that built it, that designed it, or that checked it out, feel as proud about this mission as I do.

224:41:40 Carr: Roger, Al. I think I can speak for everybody down here when I say that we’re all darn proud of it ourselves. I think all of our little mascots – Snoopy and BC and the rest of them – have really done their jobs well in helping us to keep the mission before the people and keep everybody motivated.