Given the restrictions of this board with regard to the number of pictures in a thread, I had to split this thread into two parts. This is Part 2. While Conrad and Bean were on the surface, Gordon was taking photos of the Moon. Page 3-114A shows the CSM during Revolution 28 taking photos of the Moons surface, specifically the Theophilus, Descartes and Fra Mauro regions. Descartes would eventually be the landing site for Apollo 16 and Fra Mauro would become the landing site for Apollo 14. IMU stands for Inertial Measurement Unit, and was basically how the CSM realigned itself with it's original positioning system. It allowed the spacecraft to know where it was pointing in space. Page 3-122 has to do with the LM Ascent stage lifting off from the Moon. APS stands for Ascent Propulsion Subsystem. Insertion represents when the Ascent stage reaches lunar orbital speed. Page 3-124A is a graphic depiction of the LM Ascent stage rendezvousing with the CSM. Page 3-125 shows the timeline for docking of the LM Ascent stage with the CSM. One of the major problems for navigating from the Earth to the Moon and back again was to know where the spacecraft was at any given point in time. Eventually the engineers at MIT figured out a system for doing this, but this came quite late in the development of the Command Module. A backup system was needed in case MIT could not get the instrument to function in time. Even though Apollo was the pinnacle machine of "The Space Age", a very old fashioned navigation system was updated for use as the backup system. A sextant was installed in the CSM, and roughly 30 stars in a sphere around Earth were designated as reference points. By determining where 3 stars were at any given time the astronauts could place themselves in 3 dimensional space. By the time of the launch of the manned Apollo CSM's the MIT system was up and running, and the star charting was used as a confirmation of where the CSM was in space. Page 3-169 shows one of the star chartings used on the flight. Just before re-entry, the Command Module (CM) would separate from the Service Module (SM). At that point the CM would have only battery power left, so it was important to make sure the batteries were fully charged. Page 3-171 is another BC comic that references this fact. The crew of Apollo 12 were the first humans to see a solar eclipse where the occluding body was not the Moon, but was the Earth. Page 3-202 covers this event. You can see written down by GET 241:53 that pictures were taken, and about mid-page the film magazine used. Page 3-203 deals with preparing for re-entry. In the left column EI stands for entry interface, e.g. when the CM will hit the Earth's atmosphere. Arming the pyro represents arming the explosive charges that will blow off the SM from the CM. The handwritten notes refer to which radio channels and frequencies the various recovery groups will be on, as well as the ocean conditions expected at splashdown. Page 3-205 deals with re-entry through splashdown. You can see that the whole series of events takes only 13:35 minutes from EI to splashdown. At the end of the FP there are various tabs that show various other items of interest during the flight. There are three pages that show what each astronaut's menu was and whether they ate their assorted dishes or not. Here is the Food Log for mission Commander Pete Conrad. So there you have it, an up close and personal look of what occurred during the Apollo 12 mission, the second Moon landing in history.
@Skyman I agree, Sy, that the historical importance in numismatics is interesting. Unfortunately, we don't have that many students here. Otherwise, Peter would get rid of the "What's it Worth" forum and add a "Numismatic History" forum in it's place.
