Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
They filmed aliens dancing on the Whitehouse lawn and posing with Congress, but it was in Betamax and had expired DRM, preventing viewing.
Table-ized A.I.
The Copernicus Crater link is the first time I've ever had Firefox 3 resize its window. WTH?
When they recovered them, they stored them safely on 5.25" floppy disks, where they'd be readable for a long time to co....
Wait a minute....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I was thinking along the same lines...probably the most future-proof format would be something like a jpeg, encoded into punched cards.
Even if you don't have a reader, you could use any old optical scanner, and write a (probably somewhat simple, as far as OCR goes) program to convert the images into....well, in this case, another image.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
That's the contrast of the image and depth of field(aperture) setting on the camera. Another factor would be the film stock itself, they like to use super fine grain.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
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.
Because every time you rescan the photo would result in data loss. Scanning-printing-scanning-printing would eventually result in a blurred mess that was unrecognizable as the original pic.
Scanning the punched cards and recreating the image from them, on the other hand, would give you the exact binary data used to create the photo in the first place.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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
Except for "hanging chads".
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.
2000 years ago, not much hard copy information was created, but it was written on sheepskin, and the like, most which is still available now.
800 years ago, much more information was created, and it was written on papyrus, some of which has degraded, but some of which is still available now.
70 years ago, great amounts of information was created, and it was recorded on newsprint, or those new fangled "phonograph" thingies, many of which have deteriorated or been otherwise destroyed, but some of which are available now.
10 years ago, vast, incomprehensible amounts of information were created, mostly stored in electronic digital formats, the great majority of which is not accessible today, although small amounts of it is.
What in the world makes you think that in 40 years there will be a "more future-proof media"? I'd guess in 40 years we'll have data formats and storage that last on the order of minutes, rather than years.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
"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.
I can't find the correct Slashdot article, but if I could I would had linked it, anyway:
Engrave it into stone!
Or well, come to think about it, that's already been done in a 1:1 version, with auto-updates and all!
All of the data I've created on a computer in the past 20 years is readable by modern machines -- it's on 3.5" floppy. Stored properly, and read on a clean drive (NOT the one which has been sucking up dust for the past six years, otherwise unused), this stuff still works fine.
I've thrown almost all of of it away, though. That's the part you missed in your synopsis of media history: The human aspect.
Some of the stuff that I've tossed, I'd like to get back, but it's in a landfill somewhere.
Some of the sheepskin documents survive; but the unimportant ones (as determined by the people of the day) are mostly gone, having been discarded.
Kid-proof tablet..
Paper, no matter how much it turns yellow, will still be readable if the information on it is holes through the paper.
Unless your dog gets a hold of it.
The photographic system on the spacecraft was 70mm optical film that was processed on board the spacecraft and then electronically scanned and transmitted to earth.
"Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/LOIRP/index.html http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/LOIRP/loirp-gallery-index.html
Why do you say "most of it is available now"? Do you have any idea how much written information has been lost over the last 5000 years or so of written history?
We have countless examples of information where we've lost a large part. Take the Epic Cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle . It would appear to be an extremely important work from the Classical period, and the only surviving examples are considered literary milestones. Yet only some 25% of the data has survived to this point.
75% loss over a few measly millennia is pretty lossy performance.
unfortunately the way most people save jpegs is lossy too. The TIFF/IT ISO is what most archives use, but the PDF/A ISO actually has man benefits over TIFF including XML metadata which is useful when sorting those 2000 images.
Get a web developer
People need to start shouting it from the rooftops - hoarding is bad, and when you hoard stuff like old movies you will eventually have an accident and lose it, you asshole.
These old movies have fallen into the gap between "priceless relics", "remastering to DVD would be profitable" and "plentiful enough that somebody has already copied and distributed it". Whoever has the last surviving copy won't go to the expense to digitise it, won't give it to the public domain, and wants to keep it to satisfy their own ego.
Museums are hardly better - well, they take good care of things, but in the digital age they should be hotbeds of duplication and dissemination. We should know by now, that multiple copies are required.
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.