19 November: The second moon landing

On this date in 1969, men landed on the Moon for the second time, four months after the First one. Here are ten facts about the second mission to the moon.

1. The Mission was Apollo 12. The crew were Mission commander Charles "Pete" Conrad and Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean, who landed on the moon, and Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon who stayed in orbit around the moon. The backup crew of David R. Scott, Alfred M. Worden and James B. Irwin would later fly on Apollo 15.
2. All three of Apollo 12's crew had a navy background, and their mission patch reflected that fact. It featured a clipper ship arriving at the Moon. The Command Module was called Yankee Clipper.
3. The launch was on November 14, 1969, from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Then president Richard Nixon came to watch, making this the first rocket launch attended by an incumbent US President.
4. The mission could have ended in disaster. During launch, the rocket was struck by Lightning twice. Some instruments went offline briefly and communications with Mission Control were garbled but the vehicle's flight path wasn't affected. There was a fear that the lightning could have affected the parachutes needed for a successful landing back on Earth. Without those, the Command Module would crash uncontrollably into the Pacific Ocean and kill the crew instantly. Mission Control had no way of knowing whether or not this was the case, and decided not to tell the astronauts. Luckily there was no problem and the parachutes deployed as expected.
5. The Lunar Module landed in the Ocean of Storms (Latin Oceanus Procellarum). The landing site would in future be known as Statio Cognitum. The astronauts, however, dubbed it "Pete's Parking Lot". They landed, as intended, within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 probe had landed on the moon in 1967. Conrad and Bean removed pieces of the probe to be taken back to Earth for analysis. It was the only time humans have visited a probe they previously sent to another world.
6. The first words spoken on the moon on this mission were from Conrad, who was shorter than Neil Armstrong. He said, "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me."
7. Alan Bean intended to take the first selfie on the moon by smuggling a camera timing device on board, something which was not standard equipment. Had he taken the photo with himself, Conrad and the Lunar Module in the frame, it would have certainly confused the people who's job it was to analyse all the photos. However, Bean and Conrad lost the device somewhere on the moon, so they never did it.
8. They didn't have much luck with the official camera, either. Apollo 11 only had a black and white camera. Apollo 12 was issued with a colour one in order to beam back better TV pictures. However, Bean accidentally pointed it directly at the Sun and broke it.
9. Alan Bean left his Silver astronaut pin on the moon – he threw it into a crater. The pin signified an astronaut who completed training but had not yet flown in space; he had worn it for six years. Since he had now been to space, he would be awarded with a Gold one on his return, so figured he didn't need the silver one any more.
10. Conrad and Bean spent 31 hours on the Lunar surface. On the return trip they witnessed a solar eclipse with a difference – for them it was the Earth obscuring the sun.

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