Fact Sheet
Pinpoint Landing
The Surveyor 3 spacecraft sits silently in a small lunar crater, with the Apollo 12 lunar module on the crater's rim in the background. Astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed just a few hundred feet from Surveyor 3 in November 1969 to test the precise landing techniques that would be needed for future missions. Surveyor 3 landed in 1967 and operated for about two months. Conrad and Bean snipped off several parts of the robotic lander, including its camera (the tall cylinder at the top right part of the lander) for analysis on Earth. [NASA]
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