Raptor-Actual

Saw this goofy guy just sitting with a too-wide fish in his maw.

He wasnt distressed at all, just chilling

Me, a child, reading it: Oh dear. I’m not sure I do know the way to the nearest post-office. It sounds as if that’s absolutely something I’m supposed to know. I can’t know less than a goblin. The book will be disappointed in me.

Me, a little while later, figuring out the location of a nearby post-office: oh thank goodness

The full story is amazing.

So Apollo 12 was struck by lightning 36 seconds after liftoff, which caused a power surge for obvious reasons. Instruments began to malfunction, telemetry was garbled, and the Flight Director was about to order the mission aborted.

However, a year before, Aaron had been observing a test at Kennedy Space Center and noticed some unusual readings during the test. On his own, he dug into the data and equipment, and found that the weird readings came from the little known Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE) system, and that it could be set to Auxiliary, allowing it to operate in low-power settings.

So he’d seen the readings of Apollo 12 before… and knew what to do. And gave the recommendation, “set SCE to Aux”, which was passed up by the Flight Director and CAPCOM to Apollo 12. They obeyed the order, and what looked like a disaster in the making–the freaking spaceship was HIT BY LIGHTNING!–was averted, as telemetry was restored, and Apollo 12 went to the Moon without incident.

Let me just repeat that:

Here is a larger photograph of John Aaron.

This photograph was pulled from the article about the Apollo 12 lightning strike incident on NASA’s website.

Link: https://www.nasa.gov/history/afj/ap12fj/a12-lightningstrike.html

This is a long read, but very fascinating.

As a bonus, here is a photograph of the actual lightning strike!