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Rebuilding the Moon

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mr.Curmudgeon:
Behind the counter of an abandoned McDonalds lie 48,000 lbs of 70mm tape the only copy of extremely high-resolution images of the moon.

These tapes were recorded 40 years ago as part of the Apollo program to map the lunar surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward. They have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified as they reveal the extreme precision of our spy satellites. Instead, all we have ever seen are the grainy photo-of-a-photo images that were released to the public.

The spacecraft did not ship this film back to Earth. Instead, they developed the film on the Lunar Orbiter and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/millimeter resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using yet-to-be-patented-by-others lossless analog compression. Three ground stations on Earth (one was in Madrid) recorded the transmissions on these magnetic tapes.

Recovering the data has proven to be very difficult, requiring technological archeology. The only working version of the Ampex tape player ($300K when new) was discovered in a chicken coop and restored with the help of the original designer. There is only one person on Earth who still refurbishes these tape heads, and he is retiring this year. The skills to read this data archive are on the cusp of disappearing forever.

http://www.thelivingmoon.com/47john_lear/02files/Lunar_Orbiter_Tapes_Found.html
http://www.moonviews.com/

mr.Curmudgeon:


The news anchor commentary is horrible though. I wish they'd just report, instead of trying to be clever.

SavannahLion:
This sort of thing is exactly what I argue for when it comes to saving and preserving legacy hardware (and software). I can accept that technology marches on, what I can't accept is the nonchalant ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow--- a vast majority of the population has when these technologies are deemed obsolete.

I spent nearly a year as part of a project to preserve (not John) Kennedy files. I spent months searching all over the U.S. for a machine that can read the audio ribbons we had (turns out one was hidden in a museum store room behind an early radio facsimile machine) and casual conversation at a dinner party unearthed it. Story was many of these machines were literally tossed out of windows to be smashed on the asphalt below when they were deemed obsolete.  :timebomb: Now that the economy has gone to hell, this project and others like it are being swept under the rug again.

The videos are a nightmare all unto themselves and a project I never managed to complete.  :banghead:

ChadTower:

Nevermind even the idiocy of the technology issue... how the hell does our gov't spend many millions of dollars only to make a single copy of the results and then store it for decades in an abandoned McDonald's?  Didn't anyone stop to think "gee, the taxpayers paid a hell of a lot of money for this data, and it is unique in all of the world, maybe it would be useful to put it someplace climate controlled along with the machine to read it"?

You've got people who will spend half a lifetime rebuilding a boat.  A cutting edge extraterrestrial survey of the moon?  Meh, put it by the frylolater.

Ed_McCarron:
I got the impression the folks that were retrieving the data were using the McD's as an office - not that the tapes were found there?

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