Slashdot Mirror
Has NASA Found the Lost Moon Tapes?
jra writes "For over 5 years, various people both inside and retired from NASA have been engaged in a quest. They were looking for the long-lost original slow-scan video tapes from the Apollo 11 moon landing, which went missing in a record-keeping snafu, covered in unreasonable detail in a Wired article a couple years ago. Well now, according to the UK's Sunday Express newspaper, some tapes may or may not have been found which may or may not be the Apollo video. Apparently — I love the British press — the NASA boffins are a bit put out that it leaked; they were hoping to blow everyone's minds with the scoop themselves."
That would be great if true. To lose the originals of the greatest technological and exploration achievement event since Columbus is a gut-wrenching thought. (And the existing copies are poor quality.)
Table-ized A.I.
The Sunday Express is hardly our fair isle's most reliable newspaper.
The good news is they found the tapes. The bad news is Kim Jong-il has them and wants 20 billion dollars, part of South Korea, and a lock of Michael Jackson's hair.
Table-ized A.I.
Crucially, they could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.
New facts would never dispel a perfectly good conspiracy theory. Instead, the new facts are evidence that the conspiracy is still on-going.
Up your k1lt!
Hopefully they also added the explosions and giant space worm I keep asking for. I thought of a green 3-breasted moon-babe, but realized that may be over-doing it.
Table-ized A.I.
Wouldn't it be nice if people (such as the summary writer) understood that "may" inherently includes the uncertainty as to whether it actually "does", or perhaps "does not"? Then they wouldn't feel compelled to append the completely redundant "or may not" every time.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
That's why people call you pervert ;)
Apparently someone forgot to tell NASA that they're a government agency and not some kind of mass-media Nielsen-dependent agency that relies on "scoops" and "special announcements". When they find something, they should announce it immediately. Suppose they'd found these tapes on July 21...would they have thought it appropriate to sit on them until July 20, 2019, just to have something special to go with the 50th anniversary?
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
MALWARE WARNING! DO NOT CLICK ON PARENT'S LINKS!
not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
What they aren't saying is that the Sunday Press borrowed them all along, and never returned them.
They didn't even bother to rewind, those selfish jerks.
It's great that these tapes are found (and shocking that they were ever lost). But I find it a remarkable and wholly unbelievable coincidence that they were found just before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
Yeah, no wonder NASA is pissed at it leaking now. Their marketing droids must be furious.
It's possible that nobody was formerly responsible. The TV camera thing was kind of a last-minute decision because of concerns over weight, and thus no formal media archiving procedure was set up for it. The whole landing was kind of a rush-job to meet the deadline, and thus such "afterthought" details kind of fell through the cracks.
Table-ized A.I.
It just means that NASA re-shot the moon landing using HD on the Hollywood back lot.
And the only question remaining is: does Buzz Aldrin shoot first in the new version?
My blog
Vroomfondel, is that you?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So, Is there hope for finding the missing Dr Who episodes?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If there's data on them, it's data that was lost from some mission or other. There are plenty of missions (such as the Venus landings) where a bucket of extra data spools could provide massively valuable scientific data, even to this day.
Now that the moon has been (at least partially, if not fully) mapped in high-def, and a host of other probes have been sent to collect all kinds of other data, moon tapes would be really more interesting from a historic standpoint. Nothing wrong with that, especially as staggering achievements tend to wake public interest and open the money taps, but from a scientific standpoint there must be huge numbers of reels of tape that would actually be of greater value to NASA.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable, and 'formally' has an unrhotacized schwa. Since the following syllable begins with an apical consonant that also includes velar articulation, the rhotacized schwa tends to lose its rhotacization due to anticipatory reduction. With this one feature lost, the two words become homophonous. In many (all?) non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation, Australian English, etc., the two words are already homophonous.
Ok, it's too late and I'm right about to hit the sakc so I've no time to read up on things, but as far as I remember, there are already better versions of the Apollo 11 video footage than the popular one making the rounds. The missing tapes are the recordings of the raw signal from the spaceship. This is not NTSC and it takes a custom machine to read data off the tapes. This machine, if it still exists and is functioning, can playback the video and the better quality copies were made off of this screen. The live broadcast (and poor quality copy) was made in a different way that degraded the quality further. Even so, of course it's great if they found the recordings. If they dedicate to build a new tape machine they could even digitize the signals and process them which should make for the best quality version of course. Nevertheless, it's completely innane to think this has any bearing on any stupid conspiracy theory. There are already excellent video (well, excellent as far as the technology was capable of back then) from later missions, as well as 16mm film footage from the data acquisition cameras. This footage will still be superior to Apollo 11's, even with the best of reconstructions.
"Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
> It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable...
O rly?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
NASA has yet to release a formal statement, but one of their spokespeople is describing the Sunday Express's article as "fiction". Whether this means the Apollo 11 tapes haven't actually been found, or the way they were found is completely made up, is anyone's guess, but it shows the risks of taking a tabloid newspaper's breakthrough discovery which doesn't name any of its sources at face value.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Besides, wouldn't losing lots of video be something more likely to happen to a Took than a Boffin?
I am officially gone from
I don't, actually, agree with that in this case. As several people point out when asked to justify the cost of the moon program, we didn't pay for the *hardware*, that was incidental.
We *paid* for *the knowledge we got by using the hardware*. Now, while, admittedly, this bit of lost knowledge is not as important as the *warehouses full of 7-track tape with data from {Voyager,Pioneer} that has never even been read* since being written, mush less converted to DVD/BD, and made available to the public -- because reading it requires machining new headwheels for the only *two* remaining drives which can read it (do you sense a pattern here?)... it's still important, and I think it would be a bit shortsighted to say "ah, hell, it's only the pictures from the vacation".
Watching that happen created a whole new generation of engineers.
It's not completely unreasonable to think that if they did find it, and they do release it -- oh, say, at the 40th anniversary celebration on 18-Jul at the Kennedy Center -- that seeing the coverage on the net, or on TV, might not inspire that 1 or 2% of teenagers left who aren't too cynical to care about *anything at all* into wanting to go to space...
Bob Jacobs, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA, says the story's fiction.
(via Phil Plait)
But then again, I could be wrong.
It is just as relevant today in realtime mission-critical operations.
When you write realtime code on a realtime OS you design your application so that it can get a certain amount of work done in a certain amount of time. It is critical to the operation of the machine that those tasks get done exactly on time or sooner (or maybe not even sooner). As a result, you don't use some OS and language that just runs random tasks at random times and that at any given time you have no idea what is running. Instead everything is prioritized, and you know exactly what the cpu will be working on in any phase of your mission. You don't want the garbage collector to decide to wake up one second before touchdown / docking / intercept / etc.
Sure, the Apollo hardware was an extreme case of this - wouldn't be surprised if half of it was pure single-tasking (want to do 2 jobs at once - just have 2 CPUs). It probably used core memory and I wouldn't be surprised if the RAM had as much latency as a hard drive does today. Then again, at least the cores aren't going to be bit-flipped by a cosmic ray (unless it is the kind of ray that feels like you're hit on the head by a golf-ball when it hits you). :)
You can't have race conditions in a mission-critical realtime system - or at least you can't have them where it counts.
In fact, "abort" would have been the "right" decision in my opinion based on what was known at the time.
Unless you are Neil Armstrong. There is a reason he was picked to go on that mission. He starts out as a combat jet pilot over Korea, brings back a totally shot up bird.
After taking a bit of time to get some additional education, he winds up as a test pilot... flying all sorts of exotic craft. He makes his way into NASA, and there, he makes a quick decision that saves a tumbling Gemini spacecraft. Then, he's ejecting from wildly unstable lunar lander proxy craft.
Pretty much his whole career, Armstrong flew a bunch of crazy aircraft in a bunch of dangerous situations and proved himself as having a knack for making the right decisions, and quickly, because of crunch time.
He gambled that the computer was still returning...excessive risk
I think its fair to say that with his track record, he didn't take excessive risk -for him-. He was the best flyer NASA had, and he was doing his job.
This is my sig.
Browsing at +2 helps me filter out all of the racist / pornographic trolling which sets off the word filter where I work.
/. gets a better filter for spam comments, I'm staying well into the high mod bracket.
I'd love to help by meta-moderating, but I can't afford the risk. Until
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/