Exactly 50 years ago today, on their 2nd moonwalk, Alan Bean and Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. became the first humans to touch and reach out to a spacecraft that landed on another celestial body in the past. The 1969 Apollo 12 Moon mission of NASA and the forthcoming Mars 2020 undertaking to the Red Planet may be disconnected by 500 years and 100 million miles at a distance. However, they share some mission objectives distinctive in the chronicles of the exploration of space.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory project manager of the Mars 2020 mission, John McNamee, said that they, "Mars 2020 undertaking, feel a special kinship with the Apollo 12 crew." He added, the crew achieved what the project manager described as the first precision landing, not to mention, having been able to deploy the most advanced set of science instruments and were the first-ever humans to interact with another spacecraft that's putting down on another world.
Apollo 12's Precision Landing
An online Science news site has it that "NASA needed Apollo 12 to prove" the possibility of precision landing since future missions of Apollo would aim areas in the lunar highlands; the places like massive craters, mountains, rilles and boulder fields could ruin their day, should the lunar modules wander away from the landing path required from them. And, as the past Apollo 11 mission was considered a colossal success, it exceeded its proposed the Sea of Tranquility's landing area by around six kilometers or four miles.
To exhibit a precision landing, planners of the Apollo 12 mission could have selected just about anyplace near the moon, by aiming any of the millions and millions of famous geologic features. Eventually, they opted for AI and Pete, a comparatively unremarkable hollow in the Ocean of Storms, as JPL had strummed down a spacecraft nearly three years earlier.
Science Suite
Other similarities have been identified. On their first moonwalk, Bean and Conrad set out what NASA calls as the "Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP)." It is powered by 5-science instruments, which include solar wind spectrometer, seismometer, lunar dust collector, atmospheric sensor, and magnetic field sensor. These were all the most advanced to be carried to another heavenly body, not mention, sending back revolutionary data on the lunar setting from 1969 to 1977.
When Mars 2020 perches at Jezero Crater, it will be equipped as well with the most advanced instruments of science to tour another world. Project scientist Ken Farley says the science instruments being carried benefit not just from technological advancement, but the hard lessons discovered by the missions of explorations, too, and these include Apollo that preceded them. He continued that their state-of-the-art science instruments would help obtain the most information about the atmosphere, Martian geology, potential biosignatures, and environmental conditions, to name a few. Also, during their second moonwalk, Bean and Conrad attained the Surveyor 3 lander, a robotic mission exploring the moon with the astronauts advancing the task.
