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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!
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?
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......
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.
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.
Another poster says that the tapes are helican scan, which does make it a little more difficult... But even then, armed only with the original heads and an educated guess of what the results should look like, it should be doable with far less than 2,000 pounds of additional gear. We don't need a bunch of fancy, twiddly, analog feedback sections with failing discrete components to keep things in check anymore, as this is a job better suited to a fast microcontroller and some software. The demodulation of the signal, once things are scanning right, can be done completely in software after a simple preamp and A/D stage.
Would it cost less? It'd certainly be cheaper to reinvent most of the wheel if they wanted to create a lot of these readers, but for one machine? Who knows...
Meanwhile, I'm just happy they've accomplished something.
Kid-proof tablet..
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..
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.