area. When Conrad lined up the figures from the computer in the window he recognised the familiar shape of Snowman Crater coming into view. After taking over Program 66 manual control at 122 metres Conrad found he had to sidestep the Surveyor crater. “Hey, there it is. Son of a gun, right down the middle of the road. Hey, it started right for the centre of the crater. Look out there. I can’t believe it… amazing, fantastic,” an incredulous Conrad remembered how he had asked trajectory specialist Dave Reed to target Intrepid for the middle of the crater, not really believing he could do it.
Apollo 12 used a new computer program called a Lear Processor to minimise navigational errors using the three big tracking stations on Earth to correct Intrepid’s course, or it would have overshot the target by 1,277 metres.
Conrad told Bean, “I gotta get over to my right,” and searched for a clear area just beyond Snowman Crater until at about 30 metres the rocket exhaust kicked up a raging dust storm and Conrad lost sight of the lurain under the shooting bright streaks of dust blasting away from under their feet. Eyes glued to the instrument panel, occasionally flicking to look out the window, he had no idea whether there were threatening craters or boulders below, or not. The blue light lit up; Bean announced, “Contact light,” and Conrad shut down the rocket motor. They dropped vertically to land with a solid thump about 6metres from the edge of the Surveyor crater at 12:54 am on 19 November.
Conrad: “I think I did something I said I’d never do. I believe I shut that beauty off in the air before touchdown.”
Capcom Jerry Carr in Houston: “Shame on you!”
Conrad: “Well, I was on the gauges. That’s the only way I could see where I was going. I saw that blue contact light and I shut that baby down and we just hit from about 6feet [1.8 m].”
Carr: “Roger. Break, Pete. The Air Force guys say that’s a typical Navy landing!”
Conrad: “It’s a good thing we levelled off high and came down because I sure couldn’t see what was underneath us once I got into that dust.”
Gordon, orbiting in Yankee Clipper 96kilometres above, searched through a 28 power telescope and spotted a speck of light with a shadow, then another speck nearby, about three hours after they landed. He said excitedly, “I have… I have Intrepid! I have Intrepid! The Intrepid is just on the left shoulder of Snowman… I see the Surveyor! I see the Surveyor!”
“I can’t wait to get outside – these rocks have been waiting four and a half billion years for us to come and grab them!” called an impatient Conrad as they worked their way through the essential housekeeping procedures. Five-and-a-half hours later Conrad emerged through the hatch and leapt onto the Lunar Module’s footpad with both feet. “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a long one for me!” he chuckled as he began to look around. Nobody remembers second, so his first words were said voluntarily to win a bet with an Italian journalist and to prove that Armstrong had not been pressured what to say by government officials. Then, “You’ll never believe it. Guess what I see sitting on the side of the crater – the old Surveyor.” The high spirited, exuberant Apollo 12 lunar excursions were a welcome contrast to the formal, tension filled, Apollo 11 lunar walk.
They had landed a mere 183 metres from Surveyor III, launched from Earth 31 months before. Their visit to it would have to wait for the next day, though, as the first task was to lay out all the equipment for the science experiments, the first ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package).
Conrad recalled: “And the dust! Dust got into everything. You walked in a pair of little dust clouds kicked up around your feet. We were concerned about getting dust into the working parts of our spacesuits and the Lunar Module, so we elected to remain in our suits between our two EVA’s.”
Bean to Conrad: “Boy, you sure lean forward.”
Conrad to Bean: “Don’t think you’re gonna steam around here quite as fast as you thought you were.” Bean found running on the moon was quite a new experience. He says, “When I pushed off with my toes I thought I was taking long strides, but when I checked my footprints I found it was an illusion – they were about the same distance apart as they would be on Earth. I seemed to be floating along just above the surface. Although I could jump high, I couldn’t run very fast because there wasn’t the friction with the ground in the lighter gravity.”
Conrad was going through the same experience, “You know what I feel like, Al?”
“What?”
“Did you ever see those pictures of giraffes running in slow motion?”
Bean grinned, “That’s about right.”
“That’s exactly what I feel like.”
They were jerked back into reality with a voice from faraway Texas in their earphones, “Say, would you giraffes give us some comment on your boot penetration as you move across there.”
What would happen to an astronaut if he fell down on the Moon in his suit? This was one of the concerns of the mission planners, but Conrad and Bean found it was actually fun. Conrad was the first astronaut to be able to answer that question in the first astronaut news conference from space: “I was trying to pick up something and I was just standing there next to Al. It was a rock that was just too big to go into the tongs. We had a sort of game we played there of leaning on tongs and sort of doing a one arm jabber-doo [a Conrad one-arm push up] all stretched out… I just sort of rolled over on my side down there on the ground and Al, before I got all the way down, just gave me a shove back up again. I don’t think it will be any problem, the business of falling against a rock and cutting your space suit. You don’t fall that fast. You wouldn’t hit a rock hard enough.”
Bean backed him up: “When you start, you fall so slowly that it gives you plenty of time almost to turn around or catch your footing before you get low enough down before it’s too late. I can recall a number of times when I lost my balance. If I had lost my balance that much on Earth, I would probably have fallen down. Now on the Moon, since you start moving so slowly, you’re usually able to spin around, bend your knees and recover.”
One of the big disappointments of the mission was the television camera breaking down after only 20 minutes. As Bean placed it in another spot, Nevil Eyre, video technician at Honeysuckle Creek, was watching his screen. “I could see that Alan Bean was starting to point the TV camera at the Sun, because it was getting very bright up in the top left corner of the screen – then I could see it starting to peel away from the left… it was like somebody holding a sheet of paper and putting a match to it – no flames, just burning, rolling back in a boomerang shape – and I wanted to scream at them to point the camera away from the Sun. Even the Capcom in Houston didn’t know what was happening, the message wasn’t getting to Bean. I heard the Capcom say, ‘We’re not seeing any picture, see if you can bump it’, and Bean tapped it with his hammer. I knew that wasn’t going to fix it – I knew exactly what had happened. That was the end of any video pictures from the Moon this mission.”
“The rest of the lunar activities were followed from the Earth only with sound. To us at the tracking station it was quite strange to only have black screens around, and the normally busy video section helping the telemetry technicians. Luckily the personalities of Conrad, with his infectious chuckles, ‘Dum-de-dum dum’s,’ and Bean with his enthusiastic descriptions, entertained us as they whooped, hummed, joked, and rollicked around, already quite at home in this alien new environment.”
Following a thirteen-hour rest period after the first day’s activities, the two astronauts emerged from the tiny hatch again and noticed that the scene looked less dramatic. Apollo 12 had the lowest Sun angle of 5° of the Apollo missions and while they were resting the shadows had shortened and the colours had shifted from a gray to a warmer tan-gray. It now looked much easier to get to the Surveyor spacecraft.
They headed off on foot, skirting around Head Crater and Bench Crater, before turning back at Sharp Crater. They picked up samples until they arrived at the Surveyor, and were surprised to find it a brown colour when they thought it had been white at launch. As they puzzled over where this brown had come from, the soil around being gray, Houston threw in: “Hey, Pete, do you think there is a chance you are at the wrong Surveyor?”
Replied Conrad, “No, sir. Boy, it sure dug in the ground, didn’t it? Oh, look at those pad marks. They’re still there.”
Later Conrad wrote: “The Surveyor was coated with a coating of fine dust, and it looked tan, or even brown, in the lunar light, instead of the glistening white that it was when it left Earth. It was decided later that the dust was kicked up by our descent onto the surface, even though we were 183 metres away.
