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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( For the Moderator to pass onto Denis Wingo…there is a large Usenet audio group that I belong to that may be able to help with tape parts and information. I can be the ‘go-between’ if desired.)
Reply: I’ll take that as a go to give him your email address. ~ charles the moderator
Yes,thanks that is OK.
I am very grateful for the work of Dennis Wingo and all the other heroes of the space age who have commented on this thread. Both my husband and I followed everything, from different vantage points at that time. What miracles American know-how and can-do spirit have brought about. My belief is that this determination and drive still exist; I can see it in the grandchildren. It will take a lot of dedicated effort to see that it is passed on through the generations. Anthony and WUWT is helping tremendously, today by introducing this thread, tangential yet essential. Hit the tip jar, folks.
As one finds out in short order (doing new prod dev) the trick is getting the processing organized downstream of those fast TI A/Ds (think FPGAs b/c you’ve got no time for a standard ‘processor’, or even a DSP at that kind of raw rate!)
Anthony, just reading a financial report that I subscribe to and found that this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias applies to markets and if you scroll down, to reporting of GW as well.
I know Wiki is wobbly but selection bias adds a new dimension to analysis be it financial or any other information gathering system.
Speaking of sea ice… CT still has not fixed the Compare NH Sea Ice product… WUWT?
deadwood (12:44:10) : Had a great chuckle today when I found this:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/farewell-to-our-readers/
That looks like parody of Monckton’s style. IMO they’ve put that article in on the Precautionary Principle – might need it anyway so let’s just take precautions! 🙂
This is a problem across all types of data storage. The National Archives and NIST have been interested in this for some time. (by the way has anyone on this team contacted NIST to see if they have any equipment that they used in research that might assist in this project).
About 10 years ago I worked in an IT company that had a 400,000 cartridge tape library and a few thousand reel to reel tapes for computer data. I was asked to figure out a safe retention time for tapes and how often they should be read into memory and re-recorded on new media to preserve data that had records preservation limits. I contacted the folks at NIST and the National Archives on this issue, along with some of the manufactures. The short answer is no one knows how long digital magnetic tape will last. The manufactures would only specify the usability of the tape in read write cycles and would not even venture a guess on vault storage life.
In the case of the reel to reel tapes if they were wound with too much tension over time the tape would shrink and “cinch” forming buckles in the tape spool as the material slowly tried to adjust to the tension.
The gold substrate archival CD’s are probably good for decades if stored carefully and only read when necessary. One of the most reliable storage devices I could find was actually the simple flash memory chip. It can hold the charges used for data storage for up to 100 years according to the info I found, and will tolerate abuse that would destroy other storage media.
In one experiment they baked a flash drive into a custard pie and it worked just fine when removed and cleaned up!
That said you have two storage issue both the media and the methods and equipment to recover the data, both software and hardware.
How many of you can recover data from a wps document, even if you can read the floppy disk it is stored on?
You also need to consider the data configuration, for example on images jpg, and gif are two of the best supported formats and will probably persist for many decades. Even if they are not the format is simple enough and well documented enough (right now) that one off code could be written to recover the image if necessary. More troublesome is things like interface connections between hardware devices. How many of you still have a floppy drive available to you? How many of you can plug in a serial interface to your computer?
Right now you can still find adapters USB to serial but even the USB interface has morphed into multiple versions. If you work with critical data, please consider storing both the data on archival media and the means to recover it, both hardware and software.
This is going to be a big problem for libraries in the near future and there are studies on the topic if you look for them.
http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/gipwog/Oct-14-04.html
In the case of critical data, store it in several different media formats if possible to ensure it will be readable by some future system. For example store an important text document as .doc .rtf and .odt or pdf formats would greatly increase the odds of some future system being able to read at least one file.
In the case of spread sheets the comma delimited file could be saved as a backup to the normal spreadsheet format you normally work in.
In the case of images, jpg, gif, and tiff files are well supported file formats and not likely to disappear any time soon as they do their job very well and are widely supported in multiple software systems.
In the interest of history about the AGW debate, I would encourage Anthony to look into an archival backup of this forum, and donation of a copy to a large library, as it will 50 years from now, be a priceless archive of the mood of the time and the minutia of the debate.
Larry
One other link on records preservation:
http://www.archives.gov/electronic_records_archives/index.html
The majority of the digital information we have available today will evaporate in useful terms in 15-30 years from now. Most of what you know will be unavailable to your children and grandchildren unless everyone makes an effort to preserve the essential data from the late 20th century and the early 21’st century.
Do you have essential data records in your safety deposit box?
Larry
Larry
Great post and I agree. A mantra that I keep saying is that it does not matter if you have a 100 year storage media if you do not have a 100 year means of reading that information from the storage media.
I would add that for sites like Anthony’s or Steve M’s, these will become a valuable historical research asset at some time in the future and just how many decades will we be able to read wordpress threads? Just think about how many articles and comments that exist already here and this is just as valuable as any other information source.
(One more thing for you to worry about Anthony)
🙂
Wow Dennis! You and your team are my new heroes.
I have worked with Ampex and Saber tape drives with
head speeds that made body armor seem appropriate!
I was wondering if it would be possible to build a magnetic
array using disk drive heads, A to D the data and demodulate
using software?
Thanks again for all your hard work!
Dave
Thanks
It would be possible to do what you are talking about but I would have to call the suicide prevention line shortly thereafter. There is one thing about 1960’s era equipment that most people don’t realize today. It was incredibly touchy and it required trained field engineers to maintain. My first career was as a Field Engineer (FE) in the late 1970’s. My company build a large impact line printer, card punches, and card readers, interfaced to IBM, Amdahl, and Burrough’s computers.
For a medium sized location such as a bank data processing center, you probably had 15 guys that just baby sat the hard drives, tape drives, printers, card punches, card readers, keypunch machines, the CPU, and the comms system to interface to the big beasties. ALL of the guys that did this stuff had to have months worth of training (I spent three and a half months in school 8 hours per day to learn my hardware) where you lived with the equipment, were trained by the people that built the equipment or the training department where you were intensively fed every detail in the books, and THEN you had practical troubleshooting classes where you learned the quirks of your hardware, what had a tendency to fail, and how to fix them.
Could you imagine in 50 years from now, when we all have passed from the scene, trying to get a mainframe installation like I described up and running again? Oh and by the way, there is the software to make it run in the manner that it was designed to do.
I don’t think that people in general have a proper appreciation of just how complex that technology was and is and how far we have come in terms of usability and portability. Even with this, could you imagine trying to bring a laptop from today back to operational status in 50 years. Hell most people toss their systems in 5 years. I have a Mac Pismo laptop that is nine years old and I have gone through quite a lot of work to keep it operational.
So, no while doing something like you suggest is possible, the costs would far outweigh any benefit of doing so.
Dennis Wingo
With the volume of tape you have to transcribe, you may see some wear on your heads. That might vary the calibration (or worst case wear the heads down to where they need replacing.)
Considering how few parts you have, may I suggest considering having the heads coated by a very thin diamond layer. They might last 400 times longer.
See: Wear-resistant, diamond-like coating created by Sandia 1998
e.g. See: Diamond Tools
Diamond Coating
Diamond like coatings are also used in racing applications to keep high wear parts alive. Here is another vendor. Similar coatings are used on disk drive platters to reduce friction and wear.
http://www.anatechusa.com/thin_film_coating/default.html
http://www.circletrack.com/enginetech/ctrp_0408_casidiam_coating/index.html
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20080291570
Larry