Apollo 12 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on November 24, 1969, but the mission's final science payload — data and film from the lunar surface, including striking color images from the Moon — continued shaping public understanding of the landing through subsequent days, as NASA released imagery and briefed the press on the mission's ALSEP experiment package left operating on the Moon.
Apollo 12 nearly ended before it began. Seconds after liftoff from Cape Kennedy, the Saturn V was struck by lightning twice, knocking the command module's fuel cells offline and scrambling telemetry in Mission Control. A young flight controller, John Aaron, recognized the pattern and recommended an obscure switch setting, "SCE to Aux." Alan Bean was one of the few people aboard who knew where the switch was. The data returned, the systems were reset, and the crew continued to the Moon. There, while Richard Gordon orbited alone in the command module Yankee Clipper, Pete Conrad and Bean guided the lunar module Intrepid to a pinpoint landing in the Ocean of Storms, roughly 600 feet from Surveyor 3, an unmanned probe that had touched down more than two years earlier. Conrad, the shortest man in the astronaut corps, stepped off the ladder and said, "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me."
The two men spent about seven and a half hours outside across two moonwalks. They set up the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, a nuclear-powered station of instruments that would keep sending data to Earth for years, and they walked to Surveyor 3 to cut off pieces of it, including its television camera, so engineers could study how materials held up after long exposure on the lunar surface. Not everything worked. Early on, Bean accidentally pointed the mission's new color television camera at the Sun and burned out its imaging tube, which ended the live broadcast for audiences at home. After the astronauts rejoined Gordon, controllers sent Intrepid's discarded ascent stage crashing back into the Moon. The seismometer the crew had left behind recorded the Moon reverberating for nearly an hour, a result that surprised scientists and changed their thinking about the Moon's interior.
The homecoming had one last jolt. When Yankee Clipper hit the Pacific near American Samoa, a 16-millimeter camera broke loose and struck Bean above the eye. It knocked him briefly unconscious and left a cut that needed stitches. The crew was recovered by the USS Hornet, the same carrier that had picked up Apollo 11, and went straight into quarantine as a precaution against lunar microbes, first aboard the ship and then at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston. They brought back about 75 pounds of rock and soil and the scarred Surveyor hardware. The mission also showed that Apollo could land exactly where planners aimed, and that precision made the later, more ambitious landings possible.
Key people: Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Richard Gordon