Word: surveyor
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Additional Risks. If all continued to go well, the mission would take ten days -two days more than the voyage of Apollo 11. Conrad would attempt a pinpoint landing only a few hundred feet from the resting place of Surveyor 3, the unmanned moon probe that soft-landed on the lunar surface April 19. 1967. He and Bean would stroll for as long as 74 hours on the moon and collect up to 75 lbs. of lunar rock. Most important, Apollo 12 would leave behind a more sophisticated array of sensitive instruments than those left by Apollo 11. Powered...
...Apollo 12's target, Intrepid must set down just east of the Surveyor Crater's edge. Conrad will probably not be able to see the Surveyor as he swoops down, for the craft will be in the deep shadow of early lunar morning. But he should have little difficulty spotting the Surveyor Crater. It forms the torso of what astronauts call the "Snowman," a distinctive cluster of five adjacent craters...
Exquisite Precision. More than pride is involved in the accomplishment of a pinpoint landing. If Intrepid touches down too far from its target crater, Conrad and Bean may not have enough oxygen in their back-up life-support packs for the planned walk to the Surveyor spacecraft. An inaccurate landing would also affect plans for next spring's scheduled Apollo 13 visit to a highlands area near Crater Fra Mauro. Before as tronauts risk landing in such a rugged area, NASA officials must be convinced that a lunar module can be set down on a selected segment...
Deliberate Crash. The astronauts' most ambitious lunar excursion will be down the 12° slope of the nearby 665-ft-wide crater that has been the resting place of Surveyor 3 ever since the unmanned probe soft-landed on the moon more than two years ago. Bean will descend first, attached to Conrad with an Alpine-style tether. If all goes well, the two men will try to reach the spidery spacecraft, examine and photograph it and then bring back some of its parts, including a 17-lb. TV camera. These cannibalized samples should provide spacecraft designers with invaluable...
...scientific criteria used in some NASA decisions have also annoyed some scientists. Take, for example, the compromise choice of cameras used on the Apollo lunar flights. Early unmanned Ranger. Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter craft had taken over 106,000 photographs of the moon, and NASA claimed the Apollo flights would provide photographs 10 times better than these television images. Some cartographers argue that the Hasselblad camera used on Apollo missions has no such capability. It is perfect for propaganda shots in Life magazine and fine for geological work on the moon, but it is too small to provide enough detail...