Word: lunar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...landing on the moon. They missed a diverting incident. The Apollo 12, with a price tag of roughly $375 million, represents a refinement of hundreds of years of scientific experiment and theory, the most intricate hardware of a technological civilization. Yet when the television camera fritzed out on the lunar surface, Astronaut Alan Bean had a moment of atavism. Like any other 20th century man confronted by the perversity of nonfunctioning machines, he whacked it with his hammer...
FOUR months after the historic flight of Apollo 11, much of the mystery and tension that accompanied man's first landing on the moon seemed to be missing. But as Apollo 12's lunar module Intrepid swooped down toward the lunar surface last week, Charles ("Pete") Conrad's words conveyed the real excitement and significance of the second moon-landing mission: the newfound precision that enables the U.S. to pick a destination on the moon's rugged surface and reach it as reliably as a taxicab finds a street address in Manhattan. Directly ahead of Intrepid...
...Conrad and Bean had already exceeded the 2 hr. 21 min. lunar walk taken by Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin. But they hardly noticed the passage of time. With the enthusiasm of Tenderfoot Boy Scouts, they photographed and collected rocks, took a sample core of the lunar soil, poked into innumerable small craters and fascinated geologists with their descriptions of small, strange-looking mounds. "Don't take this the wrong way," Bean cautioned, "but they look like small volcanoes-only they're just about 4 ft. high." After four hours of exploring, during which they strayed about...
...hear me running?" Conrad asked. Responded Houston: "Looks as though you're really thundering by it." Conrad also tested the seismometer by tossing a rock-he called it an "extra grapefruit-size goody"-into a small crater. The instrument promptly signaled to Houston that it had detected the lunar version of the rolling stones...
...final hours of their first EVA (extravehicular activity), the astronauts will collect rocks and try to obtain a 15-in. core of the lunar soil. One prize that geologists hope they will bring home: some of the debris showered on the landing site billions of years ago when a huge meteor gouged out the crater Copernicus, 230 miles to the north. That may well be possible. A three-mile-wide "ray" of material apparently ejected from Copernicus cuts directly through Apollo 12's base at the Ocean of Storms...