TheApollo11Channel's video: Apollo 40th Anniversary - Apollo 12 Animation

Apollo 12 was the sixth manned flight of NASA's Apollo Program and the second mission to land on men on the Moon, just four months after Apollo 11. The Crew consisted of Mission commander & Project Gemini veteren's Charles "Pete" Conrad (Gemini 5, Gemini 11), Command Module Pilot Richard F Gordon (Gemini 11) and rookie Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean. Apollo 12 launched on November 14, 1969 at 16:22:00 UTC from Launch pad LC 39A Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA during a rainstorm. Thirty-six-and-a-half seconds after lift-off, the vehicle triggered a lightning discharge through itself and down to the earth, the telemetry stream at Mission Control was garbled nonsense. However, the Saturn V continued to fly correctly; the strikes had not affected the Saturn V's Instrument Unit. Once in earth parking orbit, the crew carefully checked out their spacecraft before re-igniting the S-IVB third stage for trans-lunar injection. The lightning strikes had caused no serious permanent damage. After lunar module separation, the S-IVB was intended to fly into solar orbit using the moon's gravity as a slingshot. However, a small error in the state vector in the Saturn's guidance system caused the S-IVB to fly past the moon at too high an altitude to achieve earth escape velocity. It remained in a semi-stable earth orbit after passing the Moon on November 18, 1969. Apollo 12 landed on November 19, 1969 at 06:54:35 UTC in an area of the Ocean of Storms that had been visited earlier by several unmanned missions including Luna 5, Ranger 7 & Surveyor 3. The landing was an exercise in precision targeting, using a Doppler effect radar technique developed to allow the pinpoint landings needed for future Apollo missions. Most of the descent was automatic, with manual control assumed by Conrad during the final few hundred feet of descent landing within walking distance (less than 200 meters) of its intended target - the Surveyor 3 probe, which had landed on the Moon in April 1967. When Conrad, who was somewhat shorter than Neil Armstrong, stepped onto the lunar surface, his first words were "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me."[5] This was not an off-the-cuff remark: Conrad had made a $500 bet with reporter Oriana Fallaci he would say these words, after she had queried whether NASA had instructed Neil Armstrong what to say as he stepped onto the Moon. Conrad later said he was never able to collect the money. To improve the quality of television pictures from the Moon, a color camera was carried on Apollo 12. Unfortunately, when Bean carried the camera to the place near the lunar module where it was to be set up, he inadvertently pointed it directly into the Sun, destroying the vidicon tube. Television coverage of this mission was thus terminated almost immediately. Conrad and Bean removed pieces of the Surveyor 3 probe to be taken back to Earth for analysis. It is claimed that common bacterium was found to have accidentally contaminated the spacecraft's camera prior to launch and survived dormant in this harsh environment for two and a half years. They also collected rocks and set up equipment that took measurements of the Moon's seismicity, solar wind flux and magnetic field, and relayed the measurements to Earth. Meanwhile Gordon, on board the Yankee Clipper in lunar orbit, took multi-spectral photographs of the Moon's surface. The Lunar Module Intrepid's ascent stage was dropped after Conrad and Bean rejoined Gordon in orbit. It impacted the Moon on November 20, 1969. The crew stayed an extra day in lunar orbit taking photographs, for a total lunar surface stay of thirty-one and a half hours and a total time in lunar orbit of eighty-nine hours. On the return flight to Earth after leaving lunar orbit, the crew of Apollo 12 witnessed and photographed a solar eclipse, though this one was of the Earth eclipsing the sun. The Command Module Yankee Clipper returned to Earth on November 24, 1969, at 20:58 UTC. During landing, a 16 mm camera dislodged from storage and struck Bean in the forehead, rendering him briefly unconscious. He suffered a mild concussion, and needed six stitches. The Apollo 12 backup crew managed to insert into the astronaut's lunar checklist (attached to the wrists of Conrad's and Bean's spacesuits) reduced sized pictures of Playboy centerfolds, surprising Conrad and Bean when they looked through the checklist flip-book during their first EVA.