From Space.com: Old Moon Images Get Modern Makeover
WOODLANDS, Texas — Think of it as a space age twist to that adage: Something old, something new…something borrowed, something blue.
Back in 1966 and 1967, NASA hurled a series of Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to the moon. Each of the five orbiters were dispatched to map the landscape in high-resolution and assist in charting where best to set down Apollo moonwalkers and open up the lunar surface to expanded human operations.
Imagery gleaned from the Lunar Orbiters over 40 years ago is now getting a 21st century makeover thanks to the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP).
By gathering the vintage hardware to playback the imagery, and then upgrading it to digital standards, researchers have yielded a strikingly fresh look at the old moon. Furthermore, LOIRP’s efforts may also lead to retrieving and beefing up video from the first human landing on the moon by Apollo 11 astronauts in July 1969.
Digital domain
Dennis Wingo, LOIRP’s team leader, detailed the group’s work in progress during last week’s 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
Teamed with SpaceRef.com, LOIRP’s saga is one of acquiring the last surviving Ampex FR-900 machinery that can play analog image data from the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. Wingo noted that the work is backed by NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, the space agency’s Innovative Partnership Program, along with private organizations, making it possible to overhaul old equipment, digitally upgrade and clean-up the imagery via software.
LOIRP is located at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. There, project members are taking the analog data, converting it into digital form and reconstructing the images.
By moving them into the digital domain, Wingo said, the photos now offer a higher dynamic range and resolution than the original pictures, he added.
“We’re going to be releasing these to the whole world,” Wingo said.
Use of the refreshed images, contrasted to what NASA’s upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission is slated to produce, has an immediate scientific benefit. That is, what is the frequency of impacts on the Moon’s already substantially crater-pocked surface?
“We’ll be able to get crater counts,” Wingo told SPACE.com. “LRO imagery of the same terrain imaged decades ago will provide a crater count over the last 40 years.”
Frozen in time
There’s also a more down to Earth output thanks to LOIRP scientists.
They have used a Lunar Orbiter 1 image of the Earth for climate studies, basically a snapshot frozen in time that shows the edge of the Antarctic ice pack on August 23, 1966.
The team is working with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado to correlate their images of the Earth with old NASA Nimbus 1 and Nimbus 2 spacecraft imagery that flew at about the same time — in the mid-1960s — as the Lunar Orbiter 1. Nimbus satellites were meteorological research and development spacecraft.
Wingo said that the original Nimbus images may have been recorded on an Ampex FR-900 – so by processing the original Nimbus tapes there is a very good chance that they can provide NASA with polar ice pack data from ten years earlier.
Lessons learned
One treasure hunt outing by LOIRP may lead to finding what some term as “lost” Apollo 11 slow scan tapes, Wingo said.
“We don’t think they are lost. People have been looking for the wrong tapes,” he said, explaining that they were recorded on Ampex FR-900 equipment — not on another type of recorder as previously thought.
Wingo said those Apollo tapes are stored at the Federal Records Center, labeled and ready for a look see.
“We think for the 40th anniversary of Apollo we may be able to get the original slow scan tapes,” Wingo said. If so, the hope is to recover them and give the public a higher-quality, never-before-seen view of human exploration of the Moon.
There is a lesson learned output from LOIRP.
In the beginning, very few people thought this could be done…but now they have seen the results,” Wingo said.
It is not enough to have 100 year recording medium, Wingo explains. Without the retention of the specific era equipment that images are archived on, it will be impossible for future generations to recover older NASA or other satellite data, he advised.
This is a general issue, not specific to the Lunar Orbiter program. The retention of critical hardware should be a requirement for flight efforts. The original historic Apollo 11 slow scan images have been lost due to inattention to this critical detail, Wingo concluded.
(h/t to Gary Boden)
UPDATE: Dennis Wingo responded in comments, and offers this LA Times story on the real trials and tribulations of this project.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-lunar22-2009mar22,0,931431.story
We owe Mr. Wingo and his team, and especially Nancy Evans, a debt of gratitude for preserving space history against the odds. – Anthony
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OT Don’t be surprised to see the March UAH and RSS figure to be up. The lower troposphere temps during the month have been higher than last year by a margin. Can’t see Archibald being correct about the low he expects in May.
I remember being able to read five unit code punched paper tape by eyeball.
Very much doubt I could do it now. :LOL:
It’s ironic that it is probably easier to find someone who can read a 5,000 year old cuneiform clay tablet than it is to read 40 year old computer media.
crosspatch (20:45:45) :
Soon all the data from the early space program will be lost as it fades away, media wears out, noise builds up from copies of copies, etc. Sad.
The only information that has survived for thousand of years intact was written on stone or plinths. These also have a date by.
We do have the pentateuch and the Iliad, no? It is not the originals, it is the painful copying by generations of monks up to the discovery of the printing press. I have a copy of the first half of the Iliad printed in Venice in 1803: yellowing pages, still useful.
The lesson is this: faithful copies. Technology can come up with more permanent records, but still, copying there should be. We call it back ups nowadays.
This is fascinating and wonderful stuff. It addresses a problem we’ve been worrying about with our domestic photo collection. I recently told my wife to go ahead and spend a four-figure sum to get our digital photos printed in hardcopy. I don’t think it is the least bit hysterical or fanciful to suggest we are sleep-walking into a new Dark Age.
PS: It took me a minute to realize that http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/images/preview/5027_h2.jpg has south at the top of the image and there is nothing of Antarctica visible in it.
Dennis Wingo,
I also look forward to hearing more about your results. It’s good to see we have tinkerers and tech-buffs like yourself. People like you really do often come up with the most fascinating things, and usually do so on a shoestring. Keep it up!
OT
I checked the ABOUT page, and I must say that I don’t see why it is necessary for jeez to remain anonymous. Everyone else on the Moderation Team and Contributors uses his/her real name, and should do so in their official function on this website.
Who is the real person behing “jeez”?
I don’t like this cloaking.
Reply: I do apologize for that that. I have reasons for maintaining my anonymity which I have discussed with Anthony. I have met Anthony in person and he knows all about me. I’ll email you on the subject ~ charles the moderator aka jeez
Dennis Wingo (00:00:29) :
I figured that you’d have some mechanical challenges too. Is this all funded by NASA? Certainly an effort well spent. I’m somewhat familiar with the efforts to get computers from that era running again, I imagine that seeing some of the first recovered images was an exciting day.
How has the tape media held up? Are you looking at as having one shot to get the best data and hope there will be enough oxide left for a second chance? I imagine that the read head “flies” over the tape – at 15,000 RPM it would be tough to make contact!
What will be the new archival storage medium for this data?
BTW – a note on clay tablets. I used to work for a printer company that pioneered letter quality dot matrix printing. To get the best record of pin impacts we used clay coated paper. Great stuff, if there were a texture on the face of the pin, we’d probably be able to see it. (The record was left by ink, not by depressions in the paper!) Magazines like National Geographic use paper with a high clay content to get their high quality images.
Concerning the Gigabyte plus file size, why not set uo a torrent and and do the down load in goog old fashioned P2P style. Mu Torrent would be a good way to do it. Lots of big movie files are downloaded with no problem and they are bigger than this data set.
Charles the Moderator, “The Dish” is a great movie. Thanks to Dennis Wingo for these efforts. I have saved your site in my Favorites. Now WUWT has many more projects to bring to the light of climate science. In reference to preserving current electronic records — including family portraits — what is a safe, long-lasting medium? I remember that my institute’s librarian was very worried about many of these issues.
Sorry to be OT, but the news from the Catlin expedition truly is upsetting today:
Plummeting temperatures today took the thermometer off the bottom of the scale, which means the team are currently enduring temperatures lower than -45°C. These extreme temperatures, the coldest experienced by the team so far in this expedition, have the strange physical side effect of causing the team to sound almost drunk as they slur their words and cognitive reactions are noticeably slower.
The “physical side effect” is “strange” only, perhaps, if one has never heard of hypothermia. I’m copying and pasting the list of sponsors’ e-mails in case anyone wants to prevail upon them to show some human decency and remove the team members while there is yet time.
catlininfo@catlin.com
patrick.birley@ecx.eu
press.services@nokia.com
tburgess@hillandknowlton.com
hasan.abdat@polarcapital.co.uk
info@jenrickgroup.co.uk
contact@triplepoint.co.uk
enquiries@prometheusmed.com
info@hidalgo.co.uk
reception@canadiannorth.com
mayday@bitc.org.uk
serge.viranian@climatefriendly.com
lwaters@london.newsquest.co.uk
info@sickchildrenstrust.org
A question from a novice. Why does the Arctic Ice mass begin its annual decline in March, when it appears that Arctic temperatures are not high enough to melt any ice? (See Catlin Expedition, e.g.)
Mr. Wingo,
An excellent and fascinating project. Thanks for sharing with us and the world.
Sunlight begins reaching the ice in Late March. Enough heat to begin warming it enough to begin melting around the edges.
JohnB (05:59:13) :
A question from a novice. Why does the Arctic Ice mass begin its annual decline in March, when it appears that Arctic temperatures are not high enough to melt any ice? (See Catlin Expedition, e.g.)
Because it is the water circulating in the oceans that is doing the melting, and already the oceans are warmer http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst-090329.gif
Look at all that light blue over Siberia on the left.
There are also animations http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/
Great effort!. Digital recording vs. analogical recording, that is the question. By the way, within a few years all those global warming models will disappear forever…modellers included (VBH=Very Black Humor)
For precise measurement, photographs must be analyzed by computer — accounting for the non-linear nature of the media’s responses. Only original media can be used — i.e. only original negatives or original sensor raw data, not prints or copies which add their non-linear responses on top of the original non-linear responses. This applies to any old photograph of any feature at close to the film’s (or sensor’s) natural resolution.
One of my projects involved taking very precise dimensional measurements from “photographic data” (i.e. negatives) — near the limit of photographic resolution. People thought they got truer results by using standard “image enhancements”. But, I proved that “enhancement” actually makes some features larger and some smaller. Moreover, photographic films have a logarithmic response to light. That further moves the “visually perceived edge” of a feature from its true position in space.
To use old photos of the entire earth to get data about ice areas, one would have to become very sophisticated and electronic in determining the ice extent. Otherwise, the answer may be larger or smaller than the “true answer”.
Dr. Roy Spencer trying to be funny on April fool’s day…LOL
Mr. Gore Recants
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
Back in my Army days I used those monstrous Ampex and 3M model 2 inch tape instrumentation recorders for a number of years to support projects that I worked. However, we had the opposite problem to Mr. Wingo. Instead of wanting to capture fleeting data we wanted to capture the maximum length of data so we ran them at 15/16 ips so those tapes would record for up to 72 hours. We used 32 track FM IF recording modules and put on one track of time code and one track of reference signal so that we could slave the playback to the original recording.
Lugging around boxes of those big tapes served as my physical training every day.
Good luck with your data recovery program. It is a noble task that really needs to be done.
Regards,
John
JohnB: This team on the ice is far north and going toward the Pole, so is in the coldest area. It’s warmer at the edges of the ice; I saw last week that much of Alaska had temps above freezing.
John F. Hultquist (22:28:29) :
And in the far future someone will wonder why there is a blob of oil-fed bacteria inside a deposit of tar under a layer of rocky sand.
Nostalgia!!
Nimbus 1 was my introduction to spacecraft operations. I was there for all 28 days of flight operations. Nimbus 2 was my introduction to spacecraft I&T and a continuing educaton in spacecraft ops. As part of that education I did the preliminary analysis on the video data that’s being resurrected here. This was the era that we first found the “brown cloud” over Asia. That’s the same “brown cloud,” of course, that was recently “discovered” again, much to my amusement.
For Dennis – thanks for dredging up the memories.
And for Anthony – thanks for publishing this
By the way, to add to my above post, the optical diffraction in the lens system must also be accounted for in the analysis. This is a function of the specific physical lens system used.
Net result of previous post and this one:
If ice extents of a few percent one way or the other matter and the edges of the ice extent of interest are “photographically fuzzy”, one needs a lot of data relevant to the exact equipment used to take the photos plus the raw, uncorrected data (sensor or negative). Then one needs to write some computer code that makes all the needed corrections, takes the measurements, and provides the answers. Visual (eyeball) measurements will not do it.
Dennis Wingo,
Just in case you didn’t stumble across this web site; Stanford University appears to have archived the Ampex Museum collection including the manuals you would kill for. I was curious so I googled and found their site:
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ft4s2004rn
Hope this turns out to be useful and I can’t wait to see all those great long forgotten images … great work
Off topic a bit so sorry,
But In thought I would share with you the underhand efforts of the UK government to cover up the costs benefits of its Climate Change Act.
it has just slipped out some massively increased costs but conveniently found some spectacular ‘benefits’. From somewhere.
http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2009/04/peter-lilley-challenges-brown-on.html
Absolutly fasacinating stuff. I’d give my eye teeth to work on a project like this
Tom Bakewell
“Why does the Arctic Ice mass begin its annual decline in March, ”
Sunlight gets stronger. After the equinox, the Northern Hemisphere has more daylight than darkness which means more time absorbing energy from the Sun and less time radiating it into space. The ocean starts to warm and the warmer water begins to melt the ice.