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The Hackers Who Recovered NASA's Lost Lunar Photos
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."
"Hacker" can't have two meanings and the efforts to muddy the definition is a transparent attempt to lessen the stigma attached to breaking into computer systems and stealing other people's shit.
Given the negative connotations of the word "hackers" - how about "dedicated engineers" instead?
It probably went something like this.
"Old School" FTW!!
After reading the headline I thought that the lost Lunar landing footage was recovered, but it is sadly not the case.
The actual story is still pretty cool, however.
So hard to do this tape chit and yet, 45 years ago Neil and Buzz walked on the mooh. Forty-Five Motherfucking Years Ago. Forest, meet tree.
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you mean somebody or a group of people broke into NASA's servers and stole the photos? Will the thieves be prosecuted or arrested?
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?"
has brought upon of user base for Very own shiiter,
have the writers at wired.com always sounded like noobs?
Don't worry, there will still be people who claim the moon landings were faked.
...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
The brilliant and ballsy engineering was typical of NASA during its golden age, a time when it was also more closely linked to other government agencies with an interest in taking pictures from space.
“These guys were operating right at the edge,” Cowing says with a reverence for these NASA engineers that’s shared by his team. “There’s a certain spy program heritage to all this, but these guys went above that, because those spy satellites would send their images back. These didn’t. They couldn’t. They were in lunar orbit.”
So NASA sent a few extra spy satellites to the Moon to do a little snooping around. That makes this even better.
We are in an era known as the digital dark age.
Oh it's okay, I'm takin it back! - Randall G.
But remember to keep the phone sanitizers.
I prefer restoring the original meaning of the "hacker" badge to its original lofty meaning
I know that "hacker" originally meaning "talented programmer" is common knowledge on Slashdot, but is this story actually true?
The idea just seems like a popular meme. Slashdot is full of nerds. Nerds like to call themselves "hackers" because it sounds cool. Then someone introduces them to the idea that they're not calling themselves criminals because that's not what the word "hacker" originally meant, and they absorb that supposed fact without question because they so deeply want it to be true.
Is it actually true? Are there any references that support this history of the word's meaning that are of higher quality than "everyone on the internet says it's true?"
Even the Wikipedia article about the definition controversy lacks any citations relevant to the supposed original meaning, even as it makes statements like "the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized" which just scream for a "citation needed" tag.
Electronic readout of on-board film processing was not a new idea, even at the time.
Brett
A tittle or superscript dot is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages. In most languages, the tittle of i or j is omitted when a diacritic is placed in the tittle's usual position, but not when the diacritic appears elsewhere.
I wouldn't want to be the one to give an estimate on how much bytes are required to adequately store the analogue data on the tapes. It could very well be ten times as much or even more. Depending on the quality of the recording, it could very well be that you'd need 32 bits per pixel and the sample rate you could achieve might mean there could be billions of pixels per image in useful data in the recordings. All of a sudden you could be dealing with multiple gigabytes per image in raw data. Derivatives with processed image data might raise that number substantially again.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The term "Hacker" has multiple meanings, but in this context it originally referred to hardware guru's,
eg, Amateur Radio enthusiasts, etc. It dates back to well before software hobbyists.
I remember a wonderful electronics hardware shop that called itself "Hacker's Heaven".
Apparently it had to change it's name when the idiot media gave the term a negative context.
In defense of those 'misusing' the word, the line between the two is thin and blurry in a lot of cases both historical and current. Hackers have always had a tendency to at least bend the rules in pursuit of knowledge. Only in the world of computers do we differentiate people who break into your computer by their intentions. We don't have white hat burglars or white hate rapists, but white hat hackers will sure as hell download your credit card details, 'to prove they can'.
Check your dictionary. Lots of things have two or more meanings.
Indeed. As explained by Barry Crocker and the Doug Anthony Allstars. ;-)
I don't think that's what they did though; early spy satellites didn't process the film onboard, they dropped it for recovery and processing on Earth. It sounds like these guys used the optics they had and coupled them to some kind of analog sensors.
Who think Hacker is a good term. Ask anyone passingly familiar with computers what the words means and they'll tell you, some fuck who breaks into other people's computers and steals their shit. All your bullshit won't change that.
And it's clear that the idiot who posted the story with that headline was trying to portray hackers in a good light.
So fuck you all, and may your dicks rot off.