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On Nov. 14, 1969, the Apollo 12 mission launched to the moon. This was the second moon landing of the Apollo program.
The two astronauts on board were Pete Conrad, commander, and Alan Bean, the lunar module pilot. Astronaut Richard Gordon, the command module pilot, stayed in the command module and orbited the moon while his crewmates went to the surface. The astronauts made a pinpoint landing in a lunar mare called the Ocean of Storms.
Apollo 12 in Pictures: Photos from NASA’s Pinpoint Moon Landing Mission
A Saturn V rocket launches NASA’s Apollo 12 mission to the moon from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Nov. 14, 1969. (Image credit: NASA)
Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad (front) Richard Gordon (left) and Alan Bean (center top in background) walk out to the Astovan for the trip to the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of their Nov. 14, 1969 launch. (Image credit: NASA)
Astronaut Pete Conrad examines the camera on Surveyor 3, with the Apollo 12 spacecraft in the background. (Image credit: NASA)
A crew portrait of the Apollo 12 astronauts. (Image credit: NASA)
(Image credit: NASA)The previous moon mission, Apollo 11, drifted far from the planned landing zone. But Apollo 12 landed close to a scientific target. That target was a robotic lander called Surveyor 3. Scientists wanted to look at Surveyor 3 to see how well the spacecraft lasted on the moon since it landed there more than two years earlier.
The Apollo 12 moonwalkers also performed a lot of moon science. The astronauts picked up 75 pounds of moon rocks. Most of the rocks were basalts that formed from molten lava. These basalts showed the Apollo 12 landing site is more than 3 billion years old.
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Hanneke Weitering is an editor at Space.com with 10 years of experience in science journalism. She has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.
