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The Hackers Who Recovered NASA's Lost Lunar Photos

Posted by Soulskill on from the best-thing-to-come-out-of-a-mcdonald's dept.

An anonymous reader sends this story from Wired: "The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise. Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it's being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. ... The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. ... The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties."

6 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Hackers? by sunderland56 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Given the negative connotations of the word "hackers" - how about "dedicated engineers" instead?

    1. Re:Hackers? by ThatsDrDangerToYou · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Given the negative connotations of the word "hackers" - how about "dedicated engineers" instead?

      I prefer restoring the original meaning of the "hacker" badge to its original lofty meaning as "one who hacks and hacks and hacks in the manner of a dedicated engineer until it rocks." ... and this clearly rocks.

    2. Re:Hackers? by excelsior_gr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The negative connotation to the word was given by the media. The people that know what they are talking about don't see it as negative.

  2. Re:Hackers by JWSmythe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Check your dictionary. Lots of things have two or more meanings.

    Among readers here, the preferred IT meaning is roughly "an expert who uses his knowledge to do things requiring extraordinary skills." It's not "the kid who tricked you into giving him your Facebook password."

    I'm curious, are you just a confused child, or a troll?

    --
    Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  3. Was this cheaper or more productive than ... by mmell · · Score: 3, Insightful
    ... just going back and taking more pictures?

    Probably.

    Is it as satisfying? No. I say it's time we go back for another firsthand look. Perhaps even land there and start doing more research - not into "what is the moon made of" or "where did the moon come from". More along the lines of "how can I build a profitable luxury hotel here?"

  4. A foretaste... by argStyopa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...of what's to come.

    This data's barely 50 years old, of extremely high value (thus worth the extraordinary effort), and relatively low Size.
    We're talking about a couple of thousand high-resolution pictures, so what, each is perhaps what, 10 megabytes (they're all b&w)? So total of 20 gigs of images?

    I know people that take more picture data than that in a single 1st birthday party.

    And in 50 years, will it be gone?

    --
    -Styopa