Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports, Volume 1Robert Godwin When the crew of Apollo 11 returned to Earth in July 1969, they brought with them a wealth of new information about the moon. Now astronauts Charles (Pete) Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon would return to the moon and build on that knowledge. The real test for the crew of Apollo 12 was not to see if they could get to the moon, but to see if they could get to an "exact" place on the moon. Their target was in an area known as the Ocean Of Storms. On November 14 1969 the crew of Apollo 12 blasted off to their place in history. Not only would Conrad and Bean become the third and fourth men to walk on the moon but they would land the lunar module "Intrepid" within 600 feet of their designated target. Waiting for them was the unmanned space probe Surveyor 3 which had soft-landed in April 1967. The flight of Apollo 12, which began almost catastrophically when the huge Saturn V was struck by lightning just moments after lift off, went on to yield an enormous amount of valuable data collected during over seven and a half hours on the lunar surface. On their return home the crew of Apollo 12 became the first humans to witness an eclipse of the Sun by the Earth. In "Apollo 12 the NASA mission reports" some of the rare official documentation of the voyage of Apollo 12 is collected and made commercially available for the first time. |
Contents
PRESS | 8 |
Earth Parking Orbit EPO | 14 |
Ascent Stage Deorbit | 20 |
Copyright | |
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alignment ALSEP angles anomaly antenna Apollo 12 Apollo Program ascent stage astronauts attitude BEAN burn cabin cabin pressure camera Center checklist COMM command module CONRAD core tube crater crew deployed deployment descent detector Dick docking dust Earth engine equipment experiment feet flight plan ft/sec fuel fuel cells going GORDON GORDON-I GORDON-The ground guess hatch jettison landing launch vehicle lift-off looked Lunar Module lunar orbit lunar surface maneuver midcourse correction minutes mission Module Pilot Moon MSFN NASA never noticed okay operation optics orbit insertion performed Pete Pete Conrad PGNS photography plane change PLSS pretty radar rendezvous rocks S-band S-IC S-II S-IVB sample sextant simulator solar wind Space Flight Network spacecraft star stowage stowed suit Surveyor switch thing tracking trajectory translunar traverse undocking updates velocity window