Science Forty-year-old scoop helps future NASA exploration of Moon | Forty-year-old scoop helps future NASA exploration of Moon |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Sunday, 22 June 2008 | |
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U.S. astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, while on their Apollo 12 mission, landed their lunar module (LM-6) “Intrepid” about 200 yards away from the NASA robotic spacecraft Surveyor 3. At the time, NASA scientists wanted to learn how the materials on the little probe had held up while on its mission in the harsh environment of the Moon. Surveyor 3 landed on the Moon on April 20, 1967. It landed at the Mare Cognitium portion of the Oceanus Procellarum. During thieir second excursion on the lunar surface, the two moon walkers removed numerous pieces of the Surveyor 3 so they could be analyzed by scientists back on Earth. One large object was the scoop on the end of Surveyer 3’s extendable, robotic arm. The scoop had dug into the lunar surface in order to analyze the composition of the lunar soil, what is called "regolith" by lunar scientists.
To make a long story short, scientists at the Johnson Space Center, after finished with studying the scoop, gave it to Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center (Hutchinson, Kansas).
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