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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."

2 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. Re:Was this cheaper or more productive than ... by mjmcc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    These images contain irreproducible (and thus priceless) data. They show the moon as it appeared in 1966, which allows comparisons to be made to the same lunar areas today. Although the surface of the moon changes very very slowly, it does change. And these pictures may allow us to measure that change. Furthermore, as the article points out, some of the pictures also show the earth as of 1966, allowing comparisons to be made with the earth of today (i.e. the extent of Arctic ice).