Volunteers Recover Lunar Orbiter 1 Photographs 150
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."
Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
$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:Why so 3D-ish without 'real' 3D? (Score:2, Insightful)
Bittorrent (Score:5, Insightful)
When they're finished, why don't they make a torrent of the data and post it to TPB?
This data is supposed to be in the public domain, so there should be no reason not to do it, and P2P might turn out to be a good failsafe, in case this happens again with whatever medium they use this time.
Piracy saved lots of BBC content once, why not try to do it for NASA?
Re:I doubt this very much. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Tape (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the data I've created on a computer in the past 20 years is readable by modern machines -- it's on 3.5" floppy. Stored properly, and read on a clean drive (NOT the one which has been sucking up dust for the past six years, otherwise unused), this stuff still works fine.
I've thrown almost all of of it away, though. That's the part you missed in your synopsis of media history: The human aspect.
Some of the stuff that I've tossed, I'd like to get back, but it's in a landfill somewhere.
Some of the sheepskin documents survive; but the unimportant ones (as determined by the people of the day) are mostly gone, having been discarded.
Re:Tape (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you say "most of it is available now"? Do you have any idea how much written information has been lost over the last 5000 years or so of written history?
We have countless examples of information where we've lost a large part. Take the Epic Cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle [wikipedia.org] . It would appear to be an extremely important work from the Classical period, and the only surviving examples are considered literary milestones. Yet only some 25% of the data has survived to this point.
75% loss over a few measly millennia is pretty lossy performance.
Re:To: Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Insightful)
Another poster says that the tapes are helican scan, which does make it a little more difficult... But even then, armed only with the original heads and an educated guess of what the results should look like, it should be doable with far less than 2,000 pounds of additional gear. We don't need a bunch of fancy, twiddly, analog feedback sections with failing discrete components to keep things in check anymore, as this is a job better suited to a fast microcontroller and some software. The demodulation of the signal, once things are scanning right, can be done completely in software after a simple preamp and A/D stage.
I agree 100% with this.
Don't try too much if the analog stuff is failing, just rebuild it with modern circuitry. Probably much cheaper and reliable.
Remember "Back to the Future"?? It's kind of like that. Replace huge discrete amplifiers with opamps. This is replacing boards the size of a book (or bigger) with the size of a thumb.
Or if this is really linear read, it probably can be rebuilt from scratch for, I dunno... $10k tops.
Of course, for the first experiments it's good to have the original reader, etc, for reference purposes.
Re:Tape (Score:4, Insightful)
All archival storage requires maintenance (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is NASA getting grief here? Vast amounts of data from other organizations are deleted every day without comment. Rather, the space and astronomy communities are eager archivists precisely because the picture in question is a unique snapshot of the Earth and Moon at that moment and time - once deleted, irretrievably lost.
That budgets often fail to provide for long term maintenance is nothing to be surprised about. The real story here - as usual with NASA - is the strength of the organization's spirited staff. These data were saved - as all things of value are ultimately saved - due to their intrinsic value, not their monetary valuation.
The other naive thing about many replies to this thread is the thought that - har, har, har - those folks back in the '60's sure didn't know what they was doin'! Rather, today's archivists are facing a vastly larger problem. Presumably the current technology choice would involve spinning storage at multiple sites, perhaps with a tape robot at a supercomputer center serving as deep storage. Those spinning disks will eventually halt - will inevitably halt - very quickly after funding runs out. The copy in deep storage relies on migrating data to new media with a cadence of something like every few years - this, too, requires an ongoing funding commitment.
Even data that are explicitly committed to optical or magnetic media with the intent of long term offline storage in a salt mine require some sort of perpetual maintenance. Modern high-density storage is no more permanent that tapes from the 60's - perhaps less so since it has been demonstrated that those old NASA tapes are still readable half a century later. These are nearly time capsule sorts of time scales.
In any event, just as with these NASA data, any attempt at permanent storage requires saving readers for the media, not just the media themselves. And this just pushes the question one level deeper as those tape drives or optical readers have to be compatible with appropriate computer technology. Save the computers? Then you have to be compatible with the evolving network standards.
Very few organization [longnow.org] pay attention to such issues.