Word: crater
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Eventually, the astronauts reached the southern rim of the 656-ft.-wide Surveyor Crater. Descending slowly, they walked to the Surveyor spacecraft. Except for a thin coating of lunar dust and white paint that may have turned tan in the intense sunlight, it had apparently been unharmed by its long exposure on the lunar surface. While Dean photographed the spacecraft, Conrad picked up some valuable souvenirs. First, he clipped off some of Surveyor's insulated TV cable, which had contained a known quantity of microorganisms when it left the earth; by examining the cable after it is returned...
...with their booty of moon film, Surveyor parts and an estimated 90 Ibs. of lunar rocks and soil, Conrad and Bean programmed Intrepid's computers for its final mission: a plunge to the lunar surface. Instead of striking the moon at a point about five miles from Surveyor Crater, Intrepid crashed 45 miles away with a force equivalent to the explosion of one ton of TNT. As expected, the ALSEP seismometer recorded the shock about 51 min. later...
...flight by radar, Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Lab determined that Surveyor had landed some where in a three-square-mile area in the south eastern corner of the Ocean of Storms. From the pictures that Survey or had transmitted, they also knew that it was standing in a crater about 100 yds. wide. Unfortunately, there were about 1,000 craters of that size within the probable landing area. Which one held the mooncraft...
University of Arizona Astronomer Ewen A. Whitaker set about to find out. Examining panoramic photographs taken by the spacecraft's TV camera from just 5 ft. off the ground, he saw a pair of large rocks inside Surveyor's crater. Looking further, he noticed that the rocks and two small craters on the floor of the crater were aligned along an imaginary path pointing directly north. "That's all we had to go on, really," says Whitaker. "We had no way of telling the size of these landmarks or the distance between them...
Using a dime-store magnifying glass given to him by a friend, Whitaker began studying photographs of roughly the same area taken from above the moon by Lunar Orbiter 3. The glass proved a valuable gift. Within 20 hours after Surveyor's landing, Whitaker located a crater with the distinctive boulder and crater pattern. Surveyor, he confidently told NASA flight planners, was on the east side of that crater. With equal confidence- based on the navigation lessons learned from the flight of Apollo 11-NASA made plans for a precision landing that would place the lunar module within walking...