Apollo 12 Soil Mechanics Investigation

Abstract

During the sojourn of the second manned spacecraft on the moon in November 1969, the astronauts C. Conrad and A. Beau performed a number of tasks of interest from a soil mechanics point of view. They crossed the lunar surface, penetrating it with a variety of objects including core tube sampling devices, and visited an unmanned Surveyor spacecraft which had landed on and communicated from the moon 31 months previously. The mechanical behaviour of the lunar soil during these activities bas been analysed and is found to be consistent with the properties of a slightly cohesive medium dense granular soil (under lunar gravity) as deduced from previous Surveyor experiments. The grain size distribution and mechanical behaviour of the lunar soil samples which were brought back to Earth are also examined.