Page One  Asteroid hunter finds Apollo-era rocket  By Andrew
Bridges The Associated Press Friday September 13, 2002  LOS
ANGELES — An amateur astronomer hunting for asteroids may have
discovered a piece of the rocket that launched the Apollo 12
astronauts to the moon in 1969, a NASA scientist said Thursday. 
The object was first spied on Sept. 3 by Arizona astronomer Bill
Yeung. Follow-up observations and calculations of its path
suggest it is orbiting the Earth once every 48 days at a
distance twice that of the moon.   Although initially believed
to be an asteroid, astronomers now suspect it is a rocket
fragment, possibly the third stage of the massive Saturn V
launched Nov. 14, 1969, with astronauts Charles “Pete” Conrad
Jr., Richard F. Gordon and Alan L. Bean aboard.   “It’s a
detective story and we’re looking at the evidence here,” said
Paul Chodas, an astronomer at the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.   Complex orbit
calculations suggest the fragment, which stan