July 9, 2009
The ‘lost’ NASA tapes
Detail of the Earthrise picture taken by the first Lunar Orbiter in 1966, as rendered at the time.
Detail of the Earthrise picture taken by the first Lunar Orbiter in 1966, rendered with modern technology.
A MacBook Pro and forty-year-old tape drives are helping restore the original Lunar Orbiter tapes.
Liquid nitrogen, vegetable steamers, Macintosh workstations and old, refrigerator-size tape drives. These are just some of the tools a new breed of Space Age archeologists is using to sift through the digital debris from the early days of NASA, mining the information in ways unimaginable when it was first gathered four decades ago.
At stake is data that could show Earth’s risk of an asteroid strike, shed light on global warming and — perhaps — even satisfy those who think the moon landings were a hoax.
The most visible of the archeologists is arguably Dennis Wingo, head of Skycorp Inc., a small aerospace engineering firm in Huntsville, Ala. He’s the driving force behind the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, operating out of a decommissioned McDonald’s (since dubbed McMoon’s) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The project’s goal is to recover and enhance as many of the original lunar landing images as possible.
Be sure to read about NASA archivist Nancy Evans and the half-ton Ampex FR-900 reel-to-reel tape drives.
(Thanks to librarian and archivist Dan Taysom.)
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7 Responses to “The ‘lost’ NASA tapes”
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What a great job to have.
This sort of seeking has been going on here since stars fell on Alabama in 1833, you know. So, not the least bit surprised.
Writing from the middle of a cotton field, a few miles north of Huntsville, C.
Stars and bars?
Ha. Good one. An infamous meteor shower.
Remember the post about sheltering kids? I’m sending mine on the path through the big cotton field to his grandmother’s with a flashlight in a few hours, near midnight. It sounds scary, maybe. But I venture he’ll write about this someday.
Maybe the stars will fall.
No stars fell on Alabama, or the cotton trail, last night. So I wait, listening, for a certain clandestine call to worship. The one where they say “bring your boxes.” Rattle rattle. Strictly for observational purposes, on my part. Good times.