difficulties with the deployment. Bean had trouble extracting the RTG's plutonium fuel element from its protective cask, and the astronauts had to resort to the use of a hammer to hit the cask and dislodge the fuel element. Some of the ALSEP packages proved hard to deploy, though the astronauts were successful in all cases. With the PSE able to detect their footprints as they headed back to the LM, the astronauts secured a core tube full of lunar material, and collected other samples. The first EVA lasted 3 hours, 56 minutes and 3 seconds. Four possible geologic traverses had been planned, the variable being where the LM might set down. Conrad had landed it between two of these potential landing points, and during the first EVA and the rest break that followed, scientists in Houston combined two of the traverses into one that Conrad and Bean could follow from their landing point. The resultant traverse resembled a rough circle, and when the astronauts emerged from the LM some 13 hours after ending the first EVA, the first stop was Head crater, some from the LM. There, Bean noticed that Conrad's footprints showed lighter material underneath, indicating the presence of ejecta from Copernicus crater, to the north, something that scientists examining overhead photographs of the site had hoped to find. After the mission, samples from Head allowed geologists to date the impact that formed Copernicus—according to initial dating, some 810,000,000 years ago. The astronauts proceeded to Bench crater and Sharp crater and past Halo crater before arriving at Surveyor crater, where the Surveyor 3 probe had landed. Fearing treacherous footing or that the probe might topple on them, they approached Surveyor cautiously, descending into the shallow crater some distance away and then following a contour to reach the craft, but found the footing solid and the probe stable. They collected several pieces of Surveyor, including the television camera, as well as taking rocks that had been studied by television. Conrad and Bean had procured an automatic timer for their Hasselblad cameras, and had brought it with them without telling Mission Control, hoping to take a selfie of the two of them with the probe, but when the time came to use it, could not locate it among the lunar samples they had already placed in their Hand Tool Carrier. Before returning to the LM's vicinity, Conrad and Bean went to