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November marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 12 mission. The
aim of the mission was to land close to the site of the Surveyor III,
which had landed on the Moon in 1967. Apollo 11 had overshot its
intended landing-place, so the plan to land close to the Surveyor
spacecraft was downplayed before the mission, in case they landed too
far away to be able to walk to it! There was interest in recovering
some components from the Surveyor spacecraft for analysis, including
samples of the aluminium tubing and electrical cables, a piece of
glass, and the sapcecraft's TV camera. Finally, they collected some of
the rocks which had been examined by the Surveyor spacecraft in 1967.
The iamge above shows Pete Conrad at the Surveyor III site, showing
how successful the Apollo 12 Lunar Module had been in landing nearby.
More details are given in
Hamish Lindsay's essay on the Apollo 12 mission on the
Honeysuckle Creek
website.
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