In a message dated 3/30/00 10:36:11 PM Central Standard Time,
jdavis@socketscience.com writes:
> Clearly, one of the Apollo missions collected this sample, three years
> after the arrival of the Surveyor. Anyone know more about this?
Apollo XII. Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (who is an accomplished painter and
has produced some great pictures of lunar exploration since his moon walking
days) hopped over to Surveyor 3 and brought back several pieces of the little
robot. These contained viable bacteria. The pin-point landing near enough
to the Surveyor 3 to allow a walk to retrieve these samples was a key
milestone in the Apollo program, so that landing sites could be chosen in
areas with only very small safe zones, so that interesting geology could be
done on the later missions.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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