Word: surveyor
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...reach it as reliably as a taxicab finds a street address in Manhattan. Directly ahead of Intrepid lay the five craters that form the familiar pattern of "Snowman." Guided unerringly by the spacecraft computer. Astronauts Conrad and Alan Bean headed straight toward the target picked months earlier in Houston: Surveyor Crater, which forms Snowman's torso and is the spot where 21 years ago the unmanned Surveyor 3 landed on the moon. Conrad could scarcely believe his eyes. "Son of a gun!" he said. "Right down the middle of the road...
...Surveyor Crater. "Conrad's Parking Lot"-the landing site chosen by Conrad -was on the opposite side of the crater, just 800 ft. away. The pinpoint landing on a target 230,000 miles away from the launch pad at Cape Kennedy boded well for the remainder of Apollo 12's mission. Even more important, it proved that U.S. space scientists had profited from the lessons of Apollo 11 -which overshot its target by four miles -and could now confidently plan for manned exploration of the more rugged highland regions of the moon...
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...
Before they crawled back into the mother ship 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...
...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...