Word: cratered
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Earth Bugs. Later, as they bounded across the lunar landscape, Conrad asked Bean: "Ever see those giraffes in slow motion? That's exactly what I feel like." Fanning out 1,300 ft. from Intrepid, they visited half a dozen craters, sank more cores and tried to collect any gases that might be venting from beneath the lunar surface by holding a small can in a 6-in.-deep trench. AH the while, Conrad filled the airwaves with ho-ho-hos, dum-de-dum-dums, cackles and other sounds of pure enjoyment. "We could work out here for eight...
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...