Apollo 12 - 40 years ago

Beeker

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 12 on the Moon. They landed on the Ocean of Storms:)

Commander by Pete Conrad, Lunar Module Pilot Alan bean and Command Module pilot Richard Gordon launched on Nov 14 1969, landing on the Moon on Nov 20 and returned to Earth on Nov 24.


This is my favourite Apollo flight due to the relaxed nature of the crew. They were a great bunch and had a great sence of humour. Pete Conrad was a legend, he died in a motorbike accident in 1999 aged 69.


You can find out more about the flight here
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo12info.html

Turtwig

Cool Video (bar the awful voice) :

lord lucan

The mission patch is hilarious!:D

ynotdu

Lesser men would have tugged on the handle that each Apollo Commander clutched to abort during lift-off,firing the command module safely away from from the Saturn V.Great to see him being remembered!:).enjoyed Your Vid Malty,this one is just 48 seconds long,just the audio of the moment of strike!
So c'mon guys would YOU have aborted,c'mon own up!:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33NnEZMS5RY

Apollo 12 launched on schedule, during a rainstorm. 36.5 seconds after lift-off from Kennedy Space Center, the vehicle triggered a lightning discharge through itself and down to the earth through the Saturn's ionized plume. Protective circuits on the fuel cells in the service module falsely detected overloads and took all three fuel cells offline, along with much of the CSM instrumentation. A second strike at 52 seconds after launch knocked out the "8-ball" attitude indicator. 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.
The loss of all three fuel cells put the CSM entirely on batteries. They were unable to maintain normal 28V DC bus voltages into the heavy 75 amp launch loads. One of the AC inverters dropped offline. These power supply problems lit nearly every warning light on the control panel and caused much of the instrumentation to malfunction.
EECOM John Aaron remembered the telemetry failure pattern from an earlier test when a power supply malfunctioned in the CSM Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE). The SCE converts raw signals from instrumentation to standard voltages for the spacecraft instrument displays and telemetry encoders.[2]
Aaron made a call: "Try SCE to aux". This switched the SCE to a backup power supply. The switch was fairly obscure and neither the Flight Director, CAPCOM, nor Commander Conrad immediately recognized it. Lunar module pilot Alan Bean, flying in the right seat as the CSM systems engineer, remembered the SCE switch from a training incident a year earlier when the same failure had been simulated. Aaron's quick thinking and Bean's memory saved what could have been an aborted mission. Bean put the fuel cells back on line, and with telemetry restored, the launch continued successfully. 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.


These Cosmonauts knew what they were doing!!:D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFF4cpMVag

Beeker

lord lucan wrote: »

The mission patch is hilarious!:D

They designed the patch themselves adding the clipper ship as they were an all Navy crew. There are four stars in the patch, one for each of the crewmen and one for C.C. Williams who would have been the lunar module pilot on this flight but was killed in 1967 in a T-38 airplane crash. Al Bean replaced C.C. as Lunar Module Pilot, and it had been his idea to put the extra star there.

ynotdu