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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Keith Minto (20:58:41) : noted:
Older cold war tapes should presumably exist and be declassified.
Obama has emphasized more openness. See:
For Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for code and data, see new guidelines by Attorney General Holder:
Attorney General Issues New FOIA Guidelines to Favor Disclosure and Transparency
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2009/March/09-ag-253.html
Memorandum for Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies Re The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/foia-memo-march2009.pdf
My guess is that there is a “cold mine” (aka gold mine) out there of data from polar orbiting military satellites during the cold war.
Similarly the Navy’s program of submarines measuring the thickness of the ice caps.
M. Van Woert et al., 2002, IGARSS Proceedings, Toronto, Canada, June 24-28, 2002.
National Snow and Ice Data Center. 1998, updated 2006. Submarine upward looking sonar ice draft profile data and statistics. Boulder, CO: National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology. Digital media.
See: Is sea ice disappearing?
Tally-ho
“Note: most of our tapes are recorded in pre-detection mode, meaning that the analog data was written to the tapes before demodulation! Forty three years later we have yet to find a tape that we cannot get data off of.”
That seems to have been a somewhat common practice in those days. I worked on recorders that did basically the same thing. A receiver would amplify and filter the RF signal and the entire output of the IF stage would get recorded to tape. The signal would then get demodulated on playback. Tape and head wear was a problem for us back then.
A great post, but I do have one problem:
“By moving them into the digital domain, Wingo said, the photos now offer a higher dynamic range and resolution than the original pictures”
Perhaps better than original prints, but you really can’t improve on the basic raw data. That’s all there is.
It would be like measuring 0.1 degree C changes in temperature from sensors that have no better than 1 degree resolution.
As for archiving, CD’s will last a very long time, they darken with use, the laser modifies the polymers in the plastic. You see an increase in errors after a few thousand reads. Absent reading (and much of this info is from early readers) they will endure. Newer CD-Rom drives use less power, may not have this issue. DVD’s and Blu-Ray may degrade faster as they have much smaller feature size.
Still have a DEC PC8-I paper tape reader/punch (8 channel) from the late 60’s. My KSR-29 Teletype became history a few years back. Folks at “T” didn’t believe they ever made a 29. IBM 705 code, military contract, looked a whole lot like the model 35. Some of that old stuff was so well made it may last forever. Hope the museum likes it.
All I can say is, what a cool project! I followed the Apollo project religiously as a kid. Good luck and I look forward to the results!
Jim
I have spent many hours at the Stanford Ampex archive!
Dennis
OT – The Sun must be really angry these days as a British hiker found out,
“Mr Briggs lost his footing after momentarily looking up at the sun, landing on rocks below and losing the emergency locator beacon he had been carrying.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/newzealand/5089287/Injured-British-hiker-stranded-up-New-Zealand-mountain-for-eight-days.html
Slightly OT but still about sea ice & sea levels:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html
Oops, I tried to paste some quotes from the article but it failed. Mods, any help?
“Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story. “
“By moving them into the digital domain, Wingo said, the photos now offer a higher dynamic range and resolution than the original pictures”
Yea this is a slight misnomer. What is being referred to here are the original film images that were made in parallel with the tapes. The tapes have a much narrower range of grey scales than the original analog data. This was due to the method use to record the data on 35 mm film.
“crosspatch (20:45:45) :
This is why I am a fan of archiving critical data in a mechanical fashion. Even a standard vinyl LP can be played back using a dixie cup and a straight pin … though not may times and not with great fidelity.
I believe our era will be looked at a thousand years from now as a dark age from which little information survives. Electronic archival is subject to loss and degradation. Writable CD-ROMs are only good for about 5 years. People’s pictures, documents, histories, publications will begin to disappear as computerized archives are lost or literally fade away.
Nothing is written down anymore. The paper is cheap and decomposes rapidly.
Google is attempting, for example, to digitize a large number of books, but what happens in case of a catastrophic loss of their archive?
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.”
Massive stone monuments are the way to go. Carve relief images and text into the walls. You could even archive the assembly code and binary that way. Imagine a huge stone temple or pyramid covered inside and out with thousands and thousands of zeros and ones!
Dennis,
wow, Ampex, Merlin, odd ball video formats
for what its worth I know the last curator of the Ampex museum and can put you in contact
My dad took care of the helicopters that flew the Apollo CM and LM modules to the Cape.
On my first engineering job, I met many of the men who put up the first spy satellites in the 60s. The PM on some of those projects is still alive, lives on Ramona, and did much of the technical work before he became PM. He is one hell of an engineer.
These men can be found and debriefed. Many still have some old hardware laying around. Many would love to help out doing tech grunt work.
Very Interesting article!
Just curious, does the bolded/italic phrase mean that the tapes were never viewed when originally made, or that they were just never released to the general public?
Dennis:
Can you get other information such as % cloud cover, vegetation cover, etc to compare with newer studies using satellite sensors?
I really wish there was a way to submit sites of interest to WUWT.
http://wrongtomorrow.com/
Could be a fantastic tool to track AGW doomsayers…
The comment about paper deteriorating reminded me of an article about data degradation I read some years ago. I believe it stated legal firms interested in long term preservation of documents were using archival quality paper. I could not find the article, but the “acid-free paper” article in Wikipedia states: “Alkaline paper has a life expectancy of over 1,000 years for the best paper and 500 years for average grades.[6]” Of course that would require temperature controlled storage. Dry mined-out salt mines with controlled cool temperature and humidity would be likely candidates, I presume.
I completely agree with all this global warming BS.
I wrote a column today about how these enviros are all fools
http://madrad2002.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/why-i-hate-the-environment/
Regarding those early Spy satellites, those were recorded on Film, then dropped with a parachute, so the actual film will be in the archives. My brother worked on deleoping some of the last film drops, as the real time electronic capture resolution was exceeding those of film capture. Remember the premise of “Ice Station Zebra?”
Anna V, when I used your links, I saw the oceans get colder from Jan to Mar, not warmer.
“It says: K-I-L-R-O-Y W-A-S H-E-R-E”
Zeroes and Ones are definitely weird constructs… imagine some future archaeologist spending an entire career trying to run the code off the obelisk, only to fail because he assumed the single line represented a nul while the large circles represented a bit.
Then again, I guess you could consider that “hardware encryption”.
Meanwhile, I’ve always been more than fascinated with the 60’s space program, and all of these images are beyond interesting to me. It reminds me how far we have come when even a cheap off-the-shelf computer has more processing power and greater ability to capture sound and images than even the multi-million dollar top quality analog equipment of just a few years ago.
Isn’t it ironic that one of the first requirements when mixing a digital recording is to simulate analog errors…
Charles the moderator,
You need not say more.
Thanks for the reply!
Harald Ambler,
Concerning hyprothermia, you are so right.
http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/science/cold_hypothermia.htm
Upsetting? Why?
Would it be a just world if such stupidity went unpunished?
If someone is dumb enough to cross a freeway blindfolded, should his genes be allowed to be passed on to the next generation? Hopefully our offsprings will have more intelligence.
The drama is drawing my interest, I must admit.
Dennis Wingo
I have a reasonably large amount of precision resistors, capacitors, a few choke coils, etc. [in a wide range of values] from the approximate era of the Ampex equipment you are using. I have no further use for them and would be happy to make all available to your project free of charge if interested.
If interested you could post a P.O. Box address.
Reply: Dennis Wingo is very interested. Please reply to my email asking permission to send him your email address ~ charles the moderator
I just checked the Catlin Expedition progress and they’ve just passed 83N. Good grief, they’re barely past the first resupply point!! At this rate they’ll be lucky if they reach the north pole by Christmas.