Apollo 12 Mission Report

The Apollo 12 mission was the twelfth in a series of flights using Apollo flight hardware and was the second lunar landing. The purpose of the mission was to perform a precise lunar landing and to conduct a specific scientific exploration of a designated landing site in the Ocean of Storms. Since the performance of the entire spacecraft was excellent, this report discusses only the systems performance that significantly differed from that of previous missions. Because they were unique to Apollo 12, the lunar surface experiments, the precision landing operation, and lunar dust contamination are reported in sections 3, 4, and 6, respectively. A complete analysis of all flight data is not possible within the time allowed for preparation of this report. Therefore, report supple­ments will be published for certain Apollo 12 systems analyses, as shown in appendix E. This appendix also lists the current status of all Apollo mission supplements, either published or in preparation. Other supplements will be published as the need is identified. In this report, all actual times prior to earth landing are elapsed time from range zero, established as the integral second before lift-off. Range zero for this mission was 16:22:00 G.m.t., November 14, 1969. Greenwich mean time is used for all times after earth landing as well as for the discussions of the experiments left on the lunar surface. All references to mileage distance are in nautical miles.