WApollo 12 was the sixth crewed flight in the United States Apollo program and the second to land on the Moon. It was launched on November 14, 1969, from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Commander Charles "Pete" Conrad and Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean performed just over one day and seven hours of lunar surface activity while Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon remained in lunar orbit.
WAlan LaVern Bean was an American naval officer and aviator, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, and NASA astronaut; he was the fourth person to walk on the Moon. He was selected to become an astronaut by NASA in 1963 as part of Astronaut Group 3.
WBench crater is a small crater in Mare Cognitum on the Moon. The name of the crater was formally adopted by the IAU in 1973.
WThe Bench Crater meteorite is a meteorite discovered on the Moon by Apollo 12 astronauts in 1969. It is part of the friable basalt lunar sample 12037. Found on the north-west rim of the Bench Crater, it is the first meteorite to be discovered on a Solar System body other than the Earth. Its diameter is just a few millimeters. It is listed as a carbonaceous chondrite by the Meteoritical Society.
WCharles "Pete" Conrad Jr. was an American NASA astronaut, aeronautical engineer, naval officer and aviator, and test pilot, and commanded the Apollo 12 space mission, on which he became the third person to walk on the Moon. Conrad was selected in NASA's second astronaut class in 1962.
WRichard Francis Gordon Jr. was an American naval officer and aviator, test pilot, and NASA astronaut, and an American football executive. He was one of 24 people to have flown to the Moon, as the command module pilot of the 1969 Apollo 12 mission which orbited the Moon 45 times. Prior to his lunar flight Gordon had flown in space as the pilot of the 1966 Gemini 11 mission.
WHalo crater is a small crater in Mare Cognitum on the Moon. The name of the crater was formally adopted by the IAU in 1973.
WHead crater is a small crater in Mare Cognitum on the Moon. The name of the crater was formally adopted by the IAU in 1973.
WUSS Hornet (CV/CVA/CVS-12) is an Essex-class aircraft carrier built for the United States Navy (USN) during World War II. Completed in late 1943, the ship was assigned to the Fast Carrier Task Force in the Pacific Ocean, the navy's primary offensive force during the Pacific War. In early 1944, she participated in attacks on Japanese installations in New Guinea, Palau and Truk among others. Hornet then took part in the Mariana and Palau Islands campaign and most of the subsidiary operations, most notably the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June that was nicknamed the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" for the disproportionate losses inflicted upon the Japanese. The ship then participated in the Philippines Campaign in late 1944, and the Volcano and Ryukyu Islands campaign in the first half of 1945. She was badly damaged by a typhoon in June and had to return to the United States for repairs.
WJ002E3 is the designation given to an object in space discovered on September 3, 2002, by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung. Initially thought to be an asteroid, it has since been tentatively identified as the S-IVB third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket, based on spectrographic evidence consistent with the titanium dioxide in the paint used on the rockets. The stage was intended to be injected into a permanent heliocentric orbit in November 1969, but is now believed instead to have gone into an unstable high Earth orbit which left Earth's proximity in 1971 and again in June 2003, with an approximately 40-year cycle between heliocentric and geocentric orbit.
WMare Cognitum is a lunar mare located in a basin or large crater which sits in the second ring of Oceanus Procellarum. To the northwest of the mare is the Montes Riphaeus mountain range, part of the rim of the buried crater or basin containing the mare. Previously unnamed, the mare received its name in 1964 in reference to its selection as the target for the successful impact probe Ranger 7, the first American spacecraft to return closeup images of the Moon's surface.
WMiddle Crescent crater is a small crater in Mare Cognitum on the Moon. The name of the crater was formally adopted by the IAU in 1973.
WMoon Museum is a small ceramic wafer three-quarters by one-half inch in size, containing artworks by six prominent artists from the late 1960s. The artists with works in the "museum" are Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Forrest Myers and Andy Warhol.
WOceanus Procellarum (Latin: Ōceanus procellārum, lit. 'Ocean of Storms' is a vast lunar mare on the western edge of the near side of the Moon. It is the only one of the lunar maria to be called an "Oceanus", due to its size: Oceanus Procellarum is the largest of the maria, stretching more than 2,500 km across its north–south axis and covering roughly 4,000,000 km2, accounting for 10.5% of the total lunar surface area.
WPalmetto crater is a small crater in the Descartes Highlands of the Moon visited by the astronauts of Apollo 16. The name of the crater was formally adopted by the IAU in 1973.
WThe Apollo 12 Passive Seismic Experiment (PSE) was placed on the lunar surface by the Apollo 12 mission as part of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). The PSE was designed to detect vibrations and tilting of the lunar surface and measure changes in gravity at the instrument location. The vibrations are due to internal seismic sources (moonquakes) and external. The primary objective of the experiment was to use these data to determine the internal structure, physical state, and tectonic activity of the Moon. The secondary objectives were to determine the number and mass of meteoroids that strike the Moon and record tidal deformations of the lunar surface.
WAs part of the Apollo 12 mission, the camera from the Surveyor 3 probe was brought back from the Moon to Earth. On analyzing the camera it was found that the common bacterium Streptococcus mitis was alive on the camera. This was attributed by NASA to the camera not being sterilized on Earth prior to its launch two and a half years previously. However, later study showed that the scientists analysing the camera on return to Earth used procedures that were inadequate to prevent recontamination after return to Earth, for instance with their arms exposed, not covering their entire bodies as modern scientists would do. There may also have been possibilities for contamination during the return mission as the camera was returned in a porous bag rather than the airtight containers used for lunar sample return. As a result, the source of the contamination remains controversial.
WSharp-Apollo crater is a small crater in Mare Cognitum on the Moon. The name of the crater was formally adopted by the IAU in 1973.
WSurveyor crater is a small crater in Mare Cognitum on the Moon. The name of the crater was formally adopted by the IAU in 1973.
WSurveyor 3 was the third lander of the American uncrewed Surveyor program sent to explore the surface of the Moon in 1967. It was the first mission to carry a surface-soil sampling-scoop.
WClifton Curtis "C.C." Williams, Jr., was an American naval aviator, test pilot, mechanical engineer, major in the United States Marine Corps, and NASA astronaut, who was killed in a plane crash; he never went into space. The crash was caused by a mechanical failure in a NASA T-38 jet trainer, which he was piloting to visit his parents in Mobile, Alabama. The failure caused the flight controls to stop responding, and although he activated the ejection seat, it did not save him. He was the fourth astronaut from NASA's Astronaut Group 3 to have died, the first two having been killed in separate T-38 flights, and the third in the Apollo 1 fire earlier that year. The aircraft crashed in Florida near Tallahassee within an hour of departing Patrick AFB.