Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dust settled down, Conrad could not contain his exuberance. "Holy cow, it's beautiful out here!" he shouted. Looking out over the Ocean of Storms, both he and Bean-unlike the relatively taciturn Apollo 11 crew-gushed. They described an undulating plain pocked by craters and filled with large boulders that looked gleaming white in the early-morning sun. "Damn, I can't wait to get outside," said Conrad. "Those rocks have been waiting 41 billion years for us to come and grab them...
What turned out to be one of Apollo 12's most valuable tools-the hammer-again came in handy before the deployment of ALSEP. While Bean offered encouragement ("Pound harder. Keep going, baby"), Conrad tapped on the plutonium core, which had become stuck in its protective cask. Finally loosened, the core was removed and inserted into the generator. Without the core, the generator would have been unable to provide electricity to power ALSEP's experiments and its radio gear...
Voyage Home. Instead of heading home immediately, the three astronauts spent another day in lunar orbit. The delay gave them time to take photographs of prospective landing sites for future Apollo missions. At week's end, after being flung out of lunar orbit by its powerful engine, Yankee Clipper began its long three-day voyage home...
...send two more telecasts to earth. One of these would include the first press conference in space. Mission Control was to relay reporters' questions to the astronauts, who would respond before a worldwide TV audience. Yet even before that briefing, it was clear that the mission of Apollo 12 had given man new confidence about his role in space. It has also proved, as Wernher von Braun said, that man can live and work on the moon, and that it can indeed be quite hospitable to visitors from earth...
SURVEYOR 3 was sent to the moon 31 months ago and was not seen again until Astronaut Richard Gordon, in lunar orbit aboard Yankee Clipper last week, spotted it through his tracking sextant. Yet NASA months ago had planned the entire Apollo 12 mission around a successful landing near Surveyor. How could the space agency know the exact location of this tiny target in the vastness of the Ocean of Storms? The answer lies in a remarkable bit of space-age detective work...