 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this week's Exploration of the Solar System, we are going to talk about the Apollo 12 and 14 missions. And yes, we're skipping Apollo 13 since that was a very special case, and we want to look at that individually. So let's look at Apollo 12 and 14. Well, Apollo 12 was the second lunar landing, and that occurred in November of 1969. It was actually close to the site of the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which we talked about previously. And you can see that in the image here, where in the foreground, we see Surveyor 3, where it landed on the moon a couple of years before. And off in the distance, we can see the lunar module. Well, why would we want to do this? First of all, it shows how accurately we can put something down on the surface of the moon. Putting it exactly where we want it, so not miles away so that the astronauts would be unable to travel there, but close enough that the astronauts could easily walk and bring back parts of the craft and return those to Earth. Now, during the return trip, they also were able to see a solar eclipse from space. Now here we can see that, a solar eclipse occurring in this case when Earth passed in front of the sun. So the Earth appearing much larger than the sun could pass in front of it and block out its light. Now, a solar eclipse on Earth is when the moon passes in front of the sun, but an eclipse can occur when any object passes in front of another object. It can be eclipsed. Now, the Apollo 14 mission was a couple of years later, and that landed on February the 5th of 1971. It brought for the first time a modular equipment transporter, which was kind of a wheeled device that allowed us to be able to bring material and to carry more material. Now there were lunar rovers, we'll see those when we talk about the last few Apollo missions. They were not in Apollo 11, or 12, or 14, but here we did have the first away to carry more equipment and free up the astronauts from carrying material around. We know that they also returned almost 100 pounds of lunar material to Earth for future study, including to this point the third largest rock, a 9 kilogram rock, returned to Earth. So the largest of those that was ever brought back. Now the Apollo 14 mission, again 1971, so you note there was a gap there, we're going to talk about the Apollo 13 mission, which was the unsuccessful one, was not able to land on the moon because of equipment, equipment failure, and we will see that later on in a future lecture here. But we did have here 100 pounds of lunar material brought back to Earth. And then of course Apollo 14 then returned to Earth a few days later, splashing down out in the Pacific Ocean, and here we can see the command module down at the bottom there with the parachutes, bringing it back down to a softer landing in the ocean. And the astronauts were then recovered from the command module by various naval vessels that would pick up them and all of the materials that they brought back from the moon. So let's go ahead and summarize a little bit about what we've looked at with these two missions. First of all, these Apollo 12 and 14 missions followed up on the success of Apollo 11 and expanded on it to explore more areas of our moon. We saw that Apollo 12 landed near the site of Surveyor 3 and was able to see that spacecraft and bring portions of it back to Earth. And Apollo 14 had the first use of a transport module which helped to carry equipment, which was kind of a preview of what we would use for lunar rovers in future missions. So that concludes this lecture on the Apollo 12 and 14 missions. We'll be back again next time for another exploration of the solar system. So until then, have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.