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Volunteers Recover Lunar Orbiter 1 Photographs
mikael writes "The LA Times is reporting on the efforts of a group of volunteers with funding from NASA to recover high resolution photographs of the Moon taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 in the 1960s. The collection of 2000 images is stored entirely on magnetic tape which can only be read by a $330,000 FR-900 Ampex magnetic tape reader. The team consisted of Nancy Evans, NASA's archivist who ensured that the 20-foot by 10-foot x 6-foot collection of magnetic tapes were never thrown out, Dennis Wingo, Keith Cowing of NASA Watch and Ken Zim who had experience of repairing video equipment. Two weeks ago, the second image, of the Copernicus Crater, was recovered."
Due to his work, we discovered additional alien structures on the moon!
...where are the full-resolution pics, karma whores?
Would have been much easier to restore if it was on a mile of punched tape. Proprietary hardware sucks!
NASA lost the original tapes of the greatest technological milestone ever, and they were allegedly twice as good as what was available to the press in 1969. Has anybody seen any news on this? It's a crying shame.
Table-ized A.I.
It's a pity, and a pattern that runs through a lot of projects. The up-front part of the project is the really exciting, easily "sold" part, so getting it funded and executed goes mostly without incident. The later followup/maintenance phase is also necessary; but is far, far less interesting so getting the necessary money and support is a problem.
It would be nice if there were way in which commitments to projects could, during the upfront phase, bake in the necessary support for the entire life of the project. Unfortunately, any method of doing that would have potential drawbacks of its own.
$250,000 and 20-some years to rebuild the tape drives to get the images back with twice the dynamic range and none of the grain of the 35mm snaps that were taken of these images originally and what do we get?
a 35K jpeg.
hopefully NASA intends to release something a little more high-res.
The oil industry has been dealing with this problem for decades.
We have the data, but there are no readers available.
The only solution that they have come up with is to re-record onto current technology. And, then, do again in a few years.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
The Copernicus Crater link is the first time I've ever had Firefox 3 resize its window. WTH?
I'm impressed as the accidental affect of the pic looking somewhat 3D-ish.
It must have focused and unfocused areas that mimic how our eyes put things together for us.
OMG there are no stars in this picture. It must have been doctored like the Lunar Landing pictures. I knew we never went to the Moon.
Or we could just ask the Las Vegas crime lab to enhance it on their computer a couple times. As soon as the giant red fingerprints stop flashing, we'll be able to zoom in on a single rock 10000x.
NASA made extensive use of medium format cameras back then. It's very likely the film from back then carried a higher resolution image than a professional DSLR made today.
http://www.moonviews.com/archives/2009/03/newly_restored_picture_of_the.html
And a little bit more background on the LOIRP here: http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-111408a.html
I thought it was funny seeing all the tapes in the kitchen of an old McDonalds, with the tape drive in the lobby.
That's 9.375 cords (and not those silly "face cords"). Now get off my lawn!
would love to see the machine itself... so they stored it digitally, how? scanning? digital camera? what format?
Dont Judge The situation by the Misfortunate. Goga.
A few weeks before each mission, NASA would put the upper stage of an Atlas into orbit, so the range could practice by skin tracking it (no beacon transmitter responding). The NASA crew chief told me, with quite a bit of pride, of one such launch, where on the first orbit the radar in Africa, Australia, Hawaii (I believe) and White Sands couldn't pick up that upper stage. The radar at A-20 not only picked it up, it picked it up as it broke over the radar horizon some 1200 miles. out.
Now to the interesting part. We had an Ampex video recorder (S/N 32) in a back wall in data processing that, as best I can remember, looked precisely like the one they're using to recover that long-ago data. We used it only occasionally to capture radar data during ECM missions. I can't recall it ever being used during a NASA mention though. What mattered then was the digital position data, which with an FPS-16 is extremely accurate.
That said, it would be interesting if a historical link did exist a USAF radar site used by NASA and the recorder now being used to recover that data.
There's a more detailed account of recovering this data at:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/v-lite/story/682783.html
When they're finished, why don't they make a torrent of the data and post it to TPB?
This data is supposed to be in the public domain, so there should be no reason not to do it, and P2P might turn out to be a good failsafe, in case this happens again with whatever medium they use this time.
Piracy saved lots of BBC content once, why not try to do it for NASA?
GPG 0x1B479C78
Magnetic tape is magnetic tape. Unless the data was stored using a helical system (a la VCR), which is highly unlikely given it was the '60s, then the only important variables are the number and size of the tracks on the tape. A new device could probably be cobbled together from parts for a hell of a lot less than $330,000. Probably a few hundred max.
"Ah, the Slashdot know-it-alls strike again. Yes, you know Sooooooooo much more than NASA about their equipment."
I made no such claim. However, there is a very good chance I know more about it than a volunteer biologist and a few other volunteers who were not trained in computers and electronics as I have been. Not to mention the reporter who wrote the article.
The manufacturer was Ampex, a maker (at that time) of tape recorders and tape drives, and the technology is not particularly exotic. I have no doubt that they were very expensive to make at the time, but then so were computers. Today, my several-years-old Palm Pilot is more powerful, in every meaningful way, than a computer that filled rooms and cost millions of dollars back then.
So why is there any surprise here? Much less sarcasm.
You know what? never mind. I shouldn't be feeding the trolls anyway.
Hand in your geek badge. PNG is the only graphics format anyone ever needs.
Man all these lame expensive 'thinker' solutions, hwo about something cheap and practical.
Print 50000 bluray copies, and send 5 copies to each university in the world.
Theres nothing like massive redundancy to protect it.
Or print 50 million copies and send it with all packets of cornflakes.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I'm all for recovering old photos of space, but do we really need more photos of the moon?
hopefully NASA intends to release something a little more high-res.
I couldn't see a specific mention of JPEG in the LA Times version. However, I've seen a number of other digital preservation efforts fail massively due to re-mastering as JPEG. Yeah, really, a lossy format for the digital master. Go figure. So the risk is there for this one.
JPEG is unsuited for master images, especially since these images will count as digital masters. GIF and even PNG are surprisingly compact and if only 256 shades of gray are needed, the GIF is usually the way to go for size.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Before there was an industry standard, seismic data used to come in all kinds of tape formats from all kinds of computers. You could not be sure whether it as integer or floating point and which of a dozen kind of floating points, byte orders, and even bit-word lengths. So you'd look for repeated patterns that might indicate scan lengths and scan header packets, then decode the header and packets separately. In the data part you'd look for bits that changed slowly that could indicate the significant part of an integer or an floating point exponent. In later days when graphics was available, making a quick integer image was big diagnostic help.
Michael Light sifted through thousands of NASA shots (many never published) to produce a coffee table book of Apollo photography, "Full Moon". Definitely worth finding a copy if you are interested in Apollo. Many of the shots reproduced are breathtaking; all are beautiful in some way.
you had me at #!
That's a pretty nutty theory.
Like most of their other decisions (every gram carried on board got unbelievable scrutiny), the decision to use Hasselblad was likely "use the best equipment for the job".
Hasselblad already had a significant market in scientific photography. And the units themselves are ideal from NASA's point of view: Very compact; unsurpassed engineering quality; extremely high quality optics and image. (These photographs may well be the most expensively obtained scientific data in history, so you don't take chances.)
Another critical consideration would also have been user interface - Can a suited astronaut easily operate the camera. Practically no current digital SLR would meet even that criterion.
you had me at #!
Very often, there's lots of data loss but the records of data loss are also lost. :)
Why is NASA getting grief here? Vast amounts of data from other organizations are deleted every day without comment. Rather, the space and astronomy communities are eager archivists precisely because the picture in question is a unique snapshot of the Earth and Moon at that moment and time - once deleted, irretrievably lost.
That budgets often fail to provide for long term maintenance is nothing to be surprised about. The real story here - as usual with NASA - is the strength of the organization's spirited staff. These data were saved - as all things of value are ultimately saved - due to their intrinsic value, not their monetary valuation.
The other naive thing about many replies to this thread is the thought that - har, har, har - those folks back in the '60's sure didn't know what they was doin'! Rather, today's archivists are facing a vastly larger problem. Presumably the current technology choice would involve spinning storage at multiple sites, perhaps with a tape robot at a supercomputer center serving as deep storage. Those spinning disks will eventually halt - will inevitably halt - very quickly after funding runs out. The copy in deep storage relies on migrating data to new media with a cadence of something like every few years - this, too, requires an ongoing funding commitment.
Even data that are explicitly committed to optical or magnetic media with the intent of long term offline storage in a salt mine require some sort of perpetual maintenance. Modern high-density storage is no more permanent that tapes from the 60's - perhaps less so since it has been demonstrated that those old NASA tapes are still readable half a century later. These are nearly time capsule sorts of time scales.
In any event, just as with these NASA data, any attempt at permanent storage requires saving readers for the media, not just the media themselves. And this just pushes the question one level deeper as those tape drives or optical readers have to be compatible with appropriate computer technology. Save the computers? Then you have to be compatible with the evolving network standards.
Very few organization pay attention to such issues.
I see 3 faces on the surface, how many can you spot?
I printed a hardcopy and I will give it to the people working on these photographs at that McDonalds place.
Very interesting and great group of people. I stopped by to get a bite to eat, only to notice McDonalds is gone and these people are there. They were happy to show me what they were doing. There are three of those Ampex units, one working and the others for parts.
Unfortunately McDonalds dismantled and removed many of their appliances so they to don't have the means to produce burgers.
I believe they will enjoy reading your comments.
400MP is more than a bit of an exaggeration of reality. I'm a big proponent of medium format films myself but I'm hard pressed to come up with a 120 film that can be expected to resolve at better than 200MP in a 6x6cm square. Just because the drum scanner will scan it at 400MP doesn't mean you're resolving any more detail from the emulsion than you would have at 399MP (let alone 200MP or in most cases 120MP).
With that said, I can take a grainy consumer grade fast film like Ilford HP5+ (ISO 400) and starting from a small web-sized image I can scale up to resolve some pretty incredible distant details. That's consumer film on a consumer flat bed scanner with little in the way of preparation for scanning.
Given a stable shooting platform, like a lunar lander, and a nice slow fine-grained film, such negatives run through modern professional lab grade drum scanners would be of a much higher resolution than you're going to get out of, say, a modern Canon EOS 5D Mk II.
Bingo. I'm quite sure NASA would be keen on seeing what's in shadow detail, something that film is outstanding at.
I read TFA but didn't find any reference to Keith doing any actual work. I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on what he actually did in this process? From my experience all Keith does is play "journalist" and stand around taking pictures on the "projects" he works on. Then he takes credit for just being there as actually "working" on the project. Anyone know? All I've ever seen Keith to do is stand around some then blog about it, maybe occasionally he makes some ad hominem attacks against something/someone he didn't personally like. Maybe I need to rethink my chosen profession.
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican