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| Apollo 12 lunar module pilot Alan Bean with commander Pete Conrad reflected in his visor. Credit: NASA |
More info: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a12/a12-techdebrief.pdf
Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean - who was also a fine artist - had some advice in 1969 for future lunar explorers who will be uncovering the moon's secrets...
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The entire lunar surface was covered with this mantle of broken up material, fine dust of varying depth. As a result, everything looked pretty much the same - sides of the craters, tops of the craters, flat lands, and ejecta blanket.
If you're going to do any geology, you're going to have to dig through this mantle of brown or black and to look beneath the surface a little bit. We had a shovel that we used for trenching, but because of the length of the extension handle and the inability to lean over and what have you, we never could trench more than about eight inches. That was about the best we could do, and that was a pretty big effort.
If we're going to do any good geology, it's going to take a lot of trenching to get down below the surface. I'd like to recommend that we get a better trenching tool.
Maybe all we need to do is lengthen the extension handle about six inches; but if we're going to look and see what's beneath the surface, we're going to have to dig it out of there somehow.
...I felt that, on the surface everything was pretty much the same and the real secrets were hiding about two to eight inches under the surface.
[Excerpt from "Apollo 12 Technical Crew Debriefing", December 1, 1969. Source: NASA]
