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."
Any news on lost Apollo 11 tapes? (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA lost the original tapes of the greatest technological milestone ever, and they were allegedly twice as good as what was available to the press in 1969. Has anybody seen any news on this? It's a crying shame.
Structural problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice if there were way in which commitments to projects could, during the upfront phase, bake in the necessary support for the entire life of the project. Unfortunately, any method of doing that would have potential drawbacks of its own.
A classic problem (Score:5, Interesting)
The oil industry has been dealing with this problem for decades.
We have the data, but there are no readers available.
The only solution that they have come up with is to re-record onto current technology. And, then, do again in a few years.
Bad web page code (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Tape (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking along the same lines...probably the most future-proof format would be something like a jpeg, encoded into punched cards.
Even if you don't have a reader, you could use any old optical scanner, and write a (probably somewhat simple, as far as OCR goes) program to convert the images into....well, in this case, another image.
35mm? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A classic problem (Score:5, Interesting)
By the time a given medium is obsolete, and reader hardware for it is no longer available, magnetic sensor technology will presumably have advanced considerably from where it was when the medium was originally designed. Thus, it seems like it should be possible to build a magnetic sensor that can detect the magnetic structure of a tape with resolution better than the original purpose built hardware. From that, you'd work in software to duplicate the original read process. This [aes.org] would be an analog of that, with optical reading of a mechanically recorded medium.
I suspect that such a project would be quite expensive, so they would have to be very interesting data to make it worthwhile.
Re:Tape (Score:4, Interesting)
Because every time you rescan the photo would result in data loss. Scanning-printing-scanning-printing would eventually result in a blurred mess that was unrecognizable as the original pic.
Scanning the punched cards and recreating the image from them, on the other hand, would give you the exact binary data used to create the photo in the first place.
An Interesting Historical Link (Score:5, Interesting)
A few weeks before each mission, NASA would put the upper stage of an Atlas into orbit, so the range could practice by skin tracking it (no beacon transmitter responding). The NASA crew chief told me, with quite a bit of pride, of one such launch, where on the first orbit the radar in Africa, Australia, Hawaii (I believe) and White Sands couldn't pick up that upper stage. The radar at A-20 not only picked it up, it picked it up as it broke over the radar horizon some 1200 miles. out.
Now to the interesting part. We had an Ampex video recorder (S/N 32) in a back wall in data processing that, as best I can remember, looked precisely like the one they're using to recover that long-ago data. We used it only occasionally to capture radar data during ECM missions. I can't recall it ever being used during a NASA mention though. What mattered then was the digital position data, which with an FPS-16 is extremely accurate.
That said, it would be interesting if a historical link did exist a USAF radar site used by NASA and the recorder now being used to recover that data.
There's a more detailed account of recovering this data at:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/v-lite/story/682783.html [thenewstribune.com]
Re:35mm? (Score:3, Interesting)
NASA are prolific Hasselblad [hasselbladusa.com] users.
A digital medium-format camera today will be better than a medium-format camera from the 60s (although expensive medium format cameras have always been stunningly good in terms of optics and resolution)
The DSLR claim might be debatable, given that some modern full-frame DSLRs have incredibly high resolutions.
I doubt this very much. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:35mm? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I doubt this very much. (Score:5, Interesting)
The trouble was repairing them. This is really a story about the inefficiency of bureaucracies. NASA experts estimated it would cost up to $6 million, but volunteers were able to do it for a fraction of that.
It probably would cost NASA a lot more because of process and administrative overhead. In this case, a dedicated person refused to give up on the project. So, what other archived information can be opened to the public with so little investment? I suspect that if NASA simply offered up the equipment and media, the data would have been recovered in time.
Re:To: Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Would it cost less? It'd certainly be cheaper to reinvent most of the wheel if they wanted to create a lot of these readers, but for one machine? Who knows...
Meanwhile, I'm just happy they've accomplished something.
Re:Tape (Score:2, Interesting)
People need to start shouting it from the rooftops - hoarding is bad, and when you hoard stuff like old movies you will eventually have an accident and lose it, you asshole.
These old movies have fallen into the gap between "priceless relics", "remastering to DVD would be profitable" and "plentiful enough that somebody has already copied and distributed it". Whoever has the last surviving copy won't go to the expense to digitise it, won't give it to the public domain, and wants to keep it to satisfy their own ego.
Museums are hardly better - well, they take good care of things, but in the digital age they should be hotbeds of duplication and dissemination. We should know by now, that multiple copies are required.