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From: dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd)
Newsgroups: net.astro
Subject: StarDate:
Message-ID: <80@utastro.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 19-Nov-85 02:00:52 EST
Article-I.D.: utastro.80
Posted: Tue Nov 19 02:00:52 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Nov-85 21:34:19 EST
Organization: U. Texas, Astronomy, Austin, TX
Lines: 35

Today is the anniversary of the second time people walked on the moon.
More -- in a moment.

November l9  Apollo Twelve

On today's date in the year l969 we landed on the moon for the second
time.  Four months after the first astronauts visited the moon, Pete
Conrad and Alan Bean became the third and fourth people to walk on
another world.  The two astronauts spent more than thirty-one hours on
the surface -- while Richard Gordon orbited above in the command module
called the Yankee Clipper.

The lunar lander -- called the Intrepid -- made a pinpoint landing in
an ancient lunar lava bed with the romantic name the Ocean of Storms.
Two hundred yards away, the unmanned probe Suveyor Three had set down
two and half years earlier.  Conrad and Bean visited the older
spacecraft while out walking on the moon.  They brought back to Earth
pieces of the Surveyor -- so that scientists could learn what effect
being on the moon had on the metal of the spacecraft.

The astronauts also collected moon rocks -- rocks that were redder and
younger than the samples from the first Apollo mission -- which had set
down in the lunar Sea of Tranquility.  Six scientific experiments were
deployed -- including a seismometer used to measure earthquakes -- or
in this case -- moonquakes.  After Conrad and Bean rejoined Gordon in
the command module, the separate lander, Intrepid, was deliberately
crashed into the moon.  The vibrations from the impact continued for
almost an hour -- providing, through the seismometers, new information
about the inside of the moon.

The Apollo Twelve mission proved that Apollo Eleven hadn't been a fluke
-- that people could travel to the moon and return safely.

Script by Diana Hadley.
(c) Copyright 1984, 1985 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin