Refute This, Hoax Lovers: More Proof Men Totally Walked on the Moon

Sorry, Moon hoax conspiracy theorists, but NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter keeps shooting holes in your arguments. The probe has entered a low enough orbit to photograph in beautiful detail various Apollo landing sites. Today, LRO Camera News released a stunning image of two historic missions – Surveyor 3 and Apollo 12. Not only were both missions neat, their overlap is the one time space contamination was a real fear. Apollo 12 astronauts returned hardware from Surveyor 3 that was home to microorganisms.

On April 20, 1967, NASA's Surveyor 3 lander bounced off the lunar surface twice before finally settling in the Ocean of Storms. It was the third probe of the program and the first armed with a scoop to sample the soil. Mounted on an electric motor-driven arm, the small scoop dug little trenches in the surface and held up samples to its camera and sent images to Earth. The lander was shut down during its first lunar night but never turned on again; the 14-day dark period brought extreme cold temperatures that sapped the batteries.

Thirty-one months later on November 19, 1969, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean went to collect pieces of the unmanned probe. Conrad landed Apollo 12's Lunar Module Intrepid 525 feet away from the Surveyor 3.

During their second moonwalk on November 20, Conrad and Bean took a nearly mile-long scenic route to reach the small spacecraft. They edged around Head crater, continued on to Bench and Sharp craters with a brief stop at Halo crater, visited the Surveyor spacecraft, and then returned to Intrepid.

Conrad and Bean retrieved several pieces of Surveyor, including its TV camera and associated electrical cables, the sample scoop, and two pieces of aluminum tubing. These items returned to Earth with the Apollo 12 crew for analysis. It was a great opportunity for NASA to determine how man made objects are affected by exposure to the harsh lunar environment.

Scientists studying the returned hardware found something more interesting than joints that had welded together in the extreme cold of the lunar nights — traces of the bacteria Streptococcus mitis were found in a piece of foam from inside the TV camera.

The story goes that Surveyor wasn't sterilized properly and the microorganisms set up camp before launch — one technician's sneeze could have done the trick. Finding traces after Apollo 12's return suggested that the microorganisms lasted for two and a half years in space. Between 50 and 100 microbes were believed to have survived launch, the vacuum of space, three years of exposure to unmetered solar radiation, temperatures as low as 20 degrees above absolute zero, and a total lack of nutrients, water, or energy source.

The foam inside the camera was the only instance of living microbes found on Surveyor's hardware; the other 32 sites cultured produced nothing. How this feat of survival was accomplished was a mystery that hinted at the longevity of this microorganism and required the project scientists join the Apollo 12 crew in quarantine.

Recent evidence, however, reveals that the story of deep space bacteria is a lot less interesting – the microbes were actually a result of accidental contamination by project scientists.

Even if it didn't return nearly indestructible microbes to Earth, Apollo 12 remains the only instance of humans visiting a probe previously sent to another world. And now we've got photographic proof that Conrad and Bean walked across the surface to recover its hardware. Taste that, hoax theorists.