* Astronomy

The Apollo 12 landing site in Oceanus Procellarum imaged during the second LRO low-altitude campaign.
 


This "snapshot in time" effect is especially evident at the Apollo 12 landing site in Oceanus Procellarum, now known as Statio Cognitum. Here, you can see the remnants of not one, but two missions to the Moon. Astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean demonstrated that a precision lunar landing with the Apollo system was possible, enabling all of the targeted landings that followed. Bean and Conrad collected rock samples and made field observations, which resulted in key discoveries about lunar geology. They also collected and returned components from the nearby US Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which landed at this site almost two and half years previously, providing important information to engineers about the how materials survive in the lunar environment.

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Anniversary of the Apollo 12 Lunar landing.

Apollo 12 - Approach and Landing - November 19, 1969

 

Apollo 12 First Steps

J002E3 is the designation given to a supposed asteroid discovered by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung on September 3, 2002. Further examination revealed the object was not a rock asteroid but instead the S-IVB third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket
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Imagine landing on the Moon, climbing down the ladder of your spacecraft, and looking around the harsh lunar landscapeto see another, older spacecraft standing only 200 yards away.
That's exactly what happened in November 1969, when astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean stepped out of the Apollo 12 lunar module. There, within walking distance on the edge of a small crater, stood Surveyor 3, an unmanned U.S. spacecraft that had landed in April 1967.

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