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."

Comments

Richard C. Hoagland also helped

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to his work, we discovered additional alien structures on the moon!

Any news on lost Apollo 11 tapes?

[Tablizer]

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.

Irony

[Evets]

$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.

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry. I'm working on a project that will, in 40 years, be able to extrapolate the missing details for the jpeg images, producing ultra-high resolution 3d videos. I will then make those videos available on YouTube.

Re:Irony

[Anenome]

Here's a nice hi-res image: http://images.spaceref.com/news/2009/lo2.copernicus.med.jpg
Approx 2160px × 1825px and 700 kb

And if you're really brave, there's a 2gb scan online!!!
http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/files/LOVframe162h3.tif

I imagine that might take awhile to load into your browser. I can't imagine pictures being posted online in the gigabyte range... maybe 50 years from now that will be a standard porn format, who knows o_O

A classic problem

[davebarnes]

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.

Re:A classic problem

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd be curious to know if(at least for the more valuable data) it would be possible/practical to build a sort of general purpose reader for obsolete media.

By the time a given medium is obsolete, and reader hardware for it is no longer available, magnetic sensor technology will presumably have advanced considerably from where it was when the medium was originally designed. Thus, it seems like it should be possible to build a magnetic sensor that can detect the magnetic structure of a tape with resolution better than the original purpose built hardware. From that, you'd work in software to duplicate the original read process. This would be an analog of that, with optical reading of a mechanically recorded medium.

I suspect that such a project would be quite expensive, so they would have to be very interesting data to make it worthwhile.

Re:So...

[cbiltcliffe]

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....

35mm?

[viridari]

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.

Re:35mm?

[Brunellus]

Resolution isn't the whole story here, either--there's also dynamic range. Black and white film emulsions, properly exposed and processed, have extremely wide dynamic ranges. Big negatives show tones better. (If you want to be blown away, have a look at some of Edward Weston's photographic work, done on 8"x10" view cameras). NASA probably went with Hasselblads as a compromise: they needed something reasonably portable that could give useful dynamic range images, too. I

An Interesting Historical Link

[InklingBooks]

This is very interesting. I worked at Eglin AFB from 1966-68, part of that time at a radar site (A-20) that provided radar tracking during the Mercury and Gemini projects. One of our FPS-16 radars would take up the track of a spacecraft from a radar at White Sands and pass it on to one at Cape Kennedy. During reentry into the Atlantic, our track was particularly important because the craft was often so far into reentry that the on-board beacon was difficult to track by the time it appeared over the horizon for Cape Kennedy.

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