NASA to Digitize its 50 Years of Photos and Films

Lucas123 writes "Putting the images and film online will allow NASA to more easily share and showcase its achievements, including photos from its Mars rover missions and from its manned and unmanned voyages to the Moon and beyond, according to Computerworld's Todd Weiss. Much of NASA's archived photos and film is currently divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories, making it hard to find specific images or archives unless a user knows exactly where it is. "Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released," according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs."

Comments

A good investment

[thc69]

Sounds like a good investment in marketing, an attempt to please the public so there will be more interest in NASA and more funding. Will it work?

Re:A good investment

[DerekLyons]

Sounds like a good investment in marketing, an attempt to please the public so there will be more interest in NASA and more funding. Will it work?

Nope. Mostly because the segment of the public that will actually be impressed by this isn't large enough to be noticeable (politically).
 
Well, maybe they would constitute a majority is some remote county in Montana.

Re:Anyone called...

[cabinetsoft]

Anyone called...Google yet?

Yeh... got this on the other end "The frequency spectrum you have dialed hasn't been granted to us yet"

Good Publicity

[Boa Constrictor]

It's nice to see something positive about NASA, I expect they're still fighting pretty hard to remain relevant to the US taxpayer. Furthermore, the whole "drunken astronauts" debacle didn't show them off in a good light. NASA is, of course, a huge financial black hole (sorry) in itself, but the spin-off products work their way into consumer sectors, so it's important that funding continues. With enough strains on the US government (sub-prime morgages leading to market damage, the odd war here and there) it will be harder than ever to justify something like this with few immediate results.

Re:Good Publicity

[canuck57]

With enough strains on the US government (sub-prime morgages leading to market damage, the odd war here and there) it will be harder than ever to justify something like this with few immediate results.

Just think, if we traded a never ending war for NASA, how much money we would save and get space flight too?

For mortgages, no big. Let the low cost lenders take the bite. Part of what is wrong here is the government spends too much money in all the wrong places and everyone expects the government to bail out banks who lent money at a rate not reflecting risk. Let the market correct I say.

If you really want more people into science, get more science; base your economy on science and not war and corporate welfare.

Re:Good Publicity

[AsnFkr]

NASA is, of course, a huge financial black hole (sorry) in itself,

A large portion of that money is dumped right back into the US economy via NASA paying private sector contractors to do development and production of their many needs. All of the money doesn't just vanish.

Re:Good Publicity

[UbuntuDupe]

Yeah, that's a tough call.

a) Bail out lenders who made crappy loans and idiot speculators (scalpers, actually) who took mortgages they couldn't afford, in the process making living costs surge.

or

b) Space exploration.

(Now replace a) with "Iraq War"!)

Re:Good Publicity

[F4_W_weasel]

One must say that, Any Space Agency is such and endevour that it deserve a little respect for some of it's work and achievements. Despite all the talk about NASA military ties, budget, mistakes, there's a good sense that NASA and EASA are really helping us find our size and place on this present universe. Cheers for NASA ( and all the good people ) that contributes with more JPGs for our wallpaper collections. Would buy a DVD if they ever release one with that DATA. keep up the good work folks.

Re:Good Publicity

[lenehey]

Lets keep it in perspective. NASA's FY 2007 budge was about $17.310 Billion out of a $2.8 trillion total budget. That means that NASA represents about 0.6% of the federal budge. Compare this to the $699 billion defense budge or even the $27 billion expended for agriculture, and you can see where our priorities lie. There were about 133 million individual tax returns filed last year. Therefore On a per individual tax payer basis, NASA's budget represents a cost average of about $130 per individual taxpayer (not including corporations) per year. Compare this to the defense budget to works out to about $5,250/year.

Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[purduephotog]

The first time NASA scanned a bunch of old chromes they used Kodak's HR-500 scanner. I got in on the end of that, after all the work had been done and (unfortunately for the world) after all the images had been rendered to 8-bit JPG/tiff files.

I'd hope the contacts I put in place could talk to each other and do it right (extended bit depth scanning, custom raw image processing) but since my old group at Kodak has been gutted to 1 person (a supervisor with no direct reports) and the building that housed all the scanning knowledge and equipment is being torn down... I somehow doubt it.

Once again, the world loses out in terms of better images holding more information.

Not that I don't think NASA will do their best- they just didn't have access to the kinds of equipment and the low-level software interface to allow the levels of high precision I'm talking about.

Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[north.coaster]

If they use the similar technology to what they are using here then it may turn out better than you expect.

Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[purduephotog]

OOOOooh I missed that post.

One thing that they (wrongly) state is that 16 bit is better than 8 bit. Yes- it shows more grey levels. But it doesn't show more DENSITY levels. That's the problem when people scan various films- film can have a tremendous density range (3.8 or so), and when you capture that much range you get images that look pathetic. They then have to be rendered down to a human-pleasing visual curve- S curve- and then what you see is something nice.

Every scanner on the market scans for an 8 bit 'S-Curve' with more grey levels (10, 12, 14, etc). Most can't/won't give you access to the raw transmission data (density = 1/transmission). I'll have to see if I can't get my old tutorial on the differences, but if you have 12 bit 'raw' density (linear corrected, of course- so greys track grey) then you can use specialized algorithms or dodging and burning to adjust the image, bring shadows up, bring highlights down, restore detail, change localized contrast- THEN YOU RENDER IT to 8 bit (or 10 or 12 bit) with the appropriate human-pleasing S-Curve.

I'm probably not making alot of sense because there are very few people out there that understand fundamentally that every scanner, 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 bit, is really throwing away a TON of the data on your film... and it's scanning it in such a way that you miss out on all that information, permanently.

But I was always picky like that.

Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[JackHoffman]

The problem isn't the image data but the way it's presented to you. A normal computer monitor has a very limited dynamic range (compared to the real world). So does a paper print. Your eyes expect a certain contrast between parts of an image. If that contrast isn't there, the image looks dull and appears to lack detail. Now take a picture with a natural dynamic range that far exceeds what a monitor can recreate (just about any picture you take outside. The dynamic range is even greater in space due to the lack of atmosphere). If you map the brightest spot in that image to white on your monitor and the darkest to black, then you get a washed out image, because the original contrast is compressed to the maximum contrast that your monitor can produce. One bright highlight in the full range data means that another area in the picture which would normally be mapped to white is now a medium gray or less on the computer screen.

NASA's Greatest Hits

[Doc Ruby]

NASA should collect some hilights of its collection and distribute them on DVD to every American. They should mail out a little book with color photos and URLs, with a DVD of what Americans pay NASA to do.

They should hire some people from AOL with the experience in those mass disc mailings. To reduce waste, NASA should include a return envelope with return postage for people who don't want it. And once the DVDs are distributed, NASA should show a TV series on PBS featuring some DVD content along with other material only shown on the TV premiere. Then NASA should sell additional content, including the TV show.

Even if NASA spends as much as AOL spends to spam us with discs, it will be worth every penny. Americans love NASA when we see it on out TVs. It's consistently among the most valued and inspiring government programmes. It's always giving us "free science" that's consistently improving our lives. If NASA just put more of that inspiration in our hands, it wouldn't have to scrape for cash and whore itself to non-science agencies nearly as much.

We deserve NASA. And NASA deserves our appreciation. If it just got sexed up a little more, especially now that shuttle launches are infrequent, winding down, and so often dramas of failure, packaging the science in handy consumer toys would reconnect us with some of our greatest successes.

Re:NASA's Greatest Hits

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because that would be an excellent use of the funding that NASA fights to get...

Here's a better idea - take some of that $500,000,000,000+ ANNUAL defense budget and reprioritize some of that into USEFUL things, such as NASA.

On a side note, I was watching The Dream Is Alive last night and it was humorous to see how optimistic about space travel we were a mere 20 years ago. Comments like how our grandchildren will be born in space (remember that this was made one generation back, so they're saying that kids will be born in space any day now). *sigh*

Re:NASA's Greatest Hits

[maxume]

Or, instead of spending the quarter or half billion dollars that you propose(or do you think it will really cost less than $1 per person?), they could just liberalize whatever media policy they have(or do they already have a pretty open media policy?) and let greedy bastards and wanton consumers do their thing.

Re:NASA's Greatest Hits

[Doc Ruby]

Yes, it would be an excellent use of the $16B NASA gets. It would probably cost about $100M or less, under 0.625% of its annual budget. Which would be an investment in getting more budget. If promoting its triumph to Americans can't get a 0.625% return on our investment, then it either needs more invested, or the system is incapable of serving all Americans. Which is a failure of the system, because there's no doubt that Americans would like the programmes more than 0.625% additional with some tangible results in our hands.

One reason why Americans were more optimistic in the mid-1980s was because we were used to seeing inspiring NASA advances displayed in hugely impressive glory on our main media: TV and movies. Since then, TV has largely left us images of NASA failures (even impressive space repairs are tainted by the knowledge that we're fixing a failure, however predictable). While we've moved onto the Internet and DVDs for much of our entertainment.

Recapturing America's imagination requires sticking images into the media that engage our imagination. That was a PR battle to win in the 1960s, when it was TV. If we win it again in more personal, more interactive media, we will again inspire Americans more, and tap that enthusiasm in bigger NASA budgets.

behind?

[Montusama]

Why aren't they digitalized already? NASA of all people should have the money and technology to digitalized everything they have produced in their lifetime. Computers have been around a while, its what got us up into space (take it we have more powerful calculators than those computers......). I can understand older photographs and films being on film but shouldn't newer photos be all digital anyways?

High Dynamic Range Imaging

[purduephotog]

Try these links-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_im aging

A very good one here - the original authority on the matter-
http://www.debevec.org/Research/HDR/

Some technical research (with good examples and clips)
http://www.anyhere.com/gward/hdrenc/hdr_encodings. html

Does that help? Probably should have included it in my earlier post.

YES!!!

[c6gunner]

"Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released," according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs."

Finally! After all these years, they're FINALLY going to show us how they faked the moon landing!!!

Re:YES!!!

[r33per]

they're FINALLY going to show us how they faked the moon landing!!! BONUS MATERIAL

> Meet the film crew
> Audio Commentary with Director of Photography
> Deleted Scenes - inc. Alien Autopsy
> Gag Reel
> Cast Interviews

Re:Saturn V blueprints?

[niteice]

I don't suppose the Russian government still has the blueprints for the N-1 lying around

Maybe they do, but how are we supposed to replicate its shoddy construction and ensuing ability to explode at random moments?

Harder than you think

[Teancum]

Digitized into what multi-media format, at what bit depth and resolution, and is it a lossy or non-lossy compression?

Digital media formats are not nearly as "standardized" as you would seem to indicate here, and such multimedia computers have not "been around a while". Certainly not the computers that "got us up into space".

In addition, even those photos which were originally done as digitized data (aka the interplanetary space probes) have all had virtually incompatible file formats from even each other, much less even from traditional web media formats like PNG, GIF, or JPEG.

On top of all of this is the sheer volume of data available that can be digitized and made available. We are not talking just a couple hundred photos here that tend to hit the cover of National Geographic, but literally millions of photos. Earth observation photos bring in tens of thousands of photos each day on just a single satellite.

Even now, I question the ability of digital cameras to capture the saturation, dynamic color depth, resolution, and other optical characteristics found with analog film. Certainly digital cameras are getting better and better, but there is room for improvement well beyond what exists even now. Over time, digital cameras may be even superior to analog photographic techniques in most situations, but it won't get rid of all of the problems.

In short, I think that you have trivialized some very real and tough problems here involved with both cataloging as well as simply dititizing these photos, not to mention other multi-media data like audio and video.

Digitizing makes it easier to lose

[alcmaeon]

This should make it much easier for NASA to lose priceless historical data than having to lose hundreds of physical tapes. Losing all data will be just a reformat away now. They just have to remember to not back up which shouldn't be too hard.

Re:So? We finally get to see...

[H0D_G]

Space Nazis are the most evil conspiracy ever! I blame them directly for the TV show big brother. pure evil!