As WUWT readers know, I covered a fascinating project on 3/31 here showing how a team of dedicated technical archaeologists are trying the get old AMPEX 2″ reel to reel data recorders functional again so that they can recover thousnads of moon and earth images from the 1960’s that would otherwise be lost to history. There is a current scientific interest in the images, as some may help determine the extent of polar ice during those years.
I’ve offered WUWT as a vehicle to help find parts and manuals. You may have access to these things and not know it. Ask around, especially with the old-timers in your department, and check your dusty basements and storage areas. – Anthony
A message from Dennis Wingo:
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), is a NASA ESMD funded project to recover the original Lunar Orbiter analog data which was recorded on an Ampex FR-900 2″ video instrumentation recorder. As far as we know, we have the last surviving drives of this type in the world. We have retired Ampex engineers working with us on this project but the FR-900 was a limited use machine (exclusively the U.S. government at the FAA, USAF, NASA).
What we need is to find any possible source of documentation (we know about the Stanford Archive and have been there many times) for the FR-900 or the possibility of actual machines.
There are similar machines with the numbers FR-901, FR-902, FR-950 that are close enough that we can use any information on them.
Please email to Anthony (or drop a comment below) and he will forward to me or drop us a note at www.moonviews.com
Thanks very much!!!
Dennis Wingo
LOIRP Project Lead
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They used to use similar Ampex tape drives for recording data from Boeing Flight Test, 777 back to 707 probably. I rode a vanpool for 10 years with Lee, an engineer who designed the data acquisiton systems. I’ll give him a call and see if he has sources for the old manuals or equipment your looking for. I work at AT&T now but the test department is probably still at building 3-800, 7755 East Marginal Way South, Seattle, WA 98108
Dennis, I enjoyed reading this and the L.A. Times article about your work.
Perhaps we’ll be seeing more of these images (at WUWT?) as you lift them off these old tapes.
I’m hoping you’ll keep the non-engineers among Anthony’s readers in mind as you decode tapes and report your findings.
The LA Times article says about the the five unmanned probes:
I was surprised that only 2,000 pictures were taken, but perhaps this makes sense, if the process of development, transmission, data-capture, etc, are as laborious as I can only imagine they were. The article says that only 35 mm snapshots of the high-resolution images have been seen by the public.
Have all the h-r images been seen in the NASA labs? In what format?
Thanks for all your time and effort. As other readers here have expressed, maybe there’s a breakthrough about polar ice in the 60’s just around the corner!
Dennis
Please send me your email address. I’m working on getting you some contacts on the magnetic tape side of things.
D.R.
Send your request through Anthony or Charles the moderator guy. Send me your address and I will get it.
BillP
Have all the h-r images been seen in the NASA labs? In what format?
Bill
No, they have not, ever. In the Apollo era, no computer could display the images at full resolution. They digitized 6 bit 800 x 800 “chits” that were used to do the final Apollo site selection. As far as I know, NONE of these captures ever made it into the public domain.
We will be doing more soon, next week as a matter of fact.
While I have nothing to contribute to the quest, I was struck by the similarity between the dialog in these posts and a subplot in the novel Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn. In the story, teams are sent of scavenger hunts to locate old space technology which has been outlawed by the environmentalists as well as any technology could be of use on an orbital colony, while being hunted by state security forces. Good luck in your quest to recover old technology.
Mike
I posted the information on other forums that I’m active on in the hopes that someone might have information. It’s amazing how quickly the word can get out on the right forums – like this one!
One other thought, I imagine you likely have checked this but just in case. I have used patent records to get theory of operations, block diagrams and even some schematics. Just type in Patent and any numbers you might have into any search engine and you can get a wealth of info.
I believe that the Library of Congress has a dedicated group that does data / image / media recovery. They would be a good source for pointers, if they don’t actually have the equipment (they have a lot of odd equipment… and the L.O.C. tended to pack-rat all sorts of information – maybe even manuals?
I would also contact some of the TLA agencies … (Three Letter Acronym… you know, NSA, CIA, FBI, …) and ask if they could recover the data… they have ‘capabilities’ in a lot of media…
One of the “odd stories” our Cray support guy told us was of entering a TLA agency site where you stripped and put on their clothes and used there tools. Nothing other than bare body in, or out. Old disk drives were simply pushed to a corner. More trouble to assure no data could be recovered than to just warehouse them… If one of these went in, the odds would be good that it never came out. Getting access might be problematic, but they might read the tape for you…
(Our sales guy had stores of leaving a flat bed truck with a Cray on it at a designated location and picking up a different flatbed with money on it the next day… don’t know if he was just pulling our leg or not, but he seemed serious. And a TLA agency would not want folks to know what ‘capabilities’ they had or what they were buying, so it makes sense.)
Finally, on Shoreline / Amphitheater (drive?) in Mountain View is the Tech Museum with things like one of the original Apple I machines. They might have one (or have a network of contacts.)
Dennis Wingo
Just found your summary: RECOVERING HIGH RESOLUTION LUNAR ORBITER IMAGES FROM ANALOG TAPE.
We look forward to the results of your project.
Following is some thinking “outside the box” that might help your data recovery.
In recovering the images, each step in the process adds noise and/or changes the signal by some function. While very good for their day, the Ampex F900’s read and amplification electronics add noise and some distortion to the signals recorded on the video tape.
Tim Channon above notes above:
I’ll presume you are working with or would like 16 bit gray scale per RGB channel. Modern digitizers readily handle 16 bit per channel at video speeds. (At slower speeds A/D’s are available with 24 bit.)
Video A/Ds May I recommend digitizing the video signal directly at the tape read heads with as little intermediate amplification as needed to feed the A/D. This would help by eliminating most headaches of trying to maintain the playback read electronics. Following are some quick sketches of some potentials for using modern digital electronics to replace the Ampex read electronics.
PCI Express Bus
“. . .version II of the PCIe bus which increases the bus speed to 10GBps.”
Some examples of 16 bit video data acquisition. E.g. for a PCIe bus Pentek’s Quad 200 MHz, 16-bit A/D Data Converter
PCI Express SDR boards feature direct FPGA connectivity
Alternatively see ADLink’s 16 bit video A/D on a PXI bus: PXI-9816/9826/9846
Such higher frequency sampling would allow immediate signal processing to remove some noise and improve recovery of the signal on the tape. E.g. sample at 200 MHz and four fold average down to 50 MHz (4 fold sum and shift two bits.)
At slower tape speeds, you could use 24 bit A/Ds with more averaging. E.g., Innovative Integration X3-SDF
Analog Devices AD7760: 2.5 MSPS, 24-Bit, 100 dB Sigma-Delta ADC with On-Chip Buffer
Capstain Rotary EncoderThe corresponding improvement on tape speed would be to add an encoder to the capstan and synch the A/D to the actual capstan speed. That would reduce motor speed frequency control issues. It would only require achieving a “fairly” stable tape drive. The rest would be handled by the encoder and signal processing.
The rotary encoder can be dynamically calibrated in time. See:
Self-Calibration of On-Axis Rotary Encoders, X.-D. Lu and D.L. Trumper, and
SELF-CALIBRATION METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ON-AXIS ROTARY ENCODERS US Patent Application 20090030638.
Processing: The rest would be “just” a matter of some signal processing.
E.g., See SuperDSP for 100 GFlop DSP cards with 50 GB/s bandwidth. In 2008, a single XP-100 card (100 Gflop) listed for $20,000 and a single XP-30 (30 GFlop) listed for $12,000. They note that the PCIe bus can handle (x8, 1.5 GB/s).
There are probably a few instrumentation experts and software types around who could help with such data acquisition and signal processing.
Such a combination of high resolution video data conversion, capstain rotary encoders, precision frequency generator, and signal processing would eliminate most electronics issues in the Ampex recorder, while improving the accuracy of reading the lunar images.
Happy hunting.
PS If you haven’t already seen it: Preliminary Guide to the Ampex Corporation Records
URL Corrections: Video Bus Standards
PCI Express SDR boards feature direct FPGA connectivity
SuperDSP.com
Apologies
Anthony, you realy have to post on this by Icecap. Its eye-opening as regards the lack of credibility and ad hominem attacck by those who have no leg to stand on.
http://www.rollcall.com/multimedia/tv/33727-1.html
http://www.rollcall.com/multimedia/tv/33726-1.html
http://www.icecap.us/
Mike Worst
David
Thanks for that. As I replied before, we are kinda funding limited here so we have to use what we have in the best way that we can. One thing that we have done is to fix up the variable timing of many of the circuits in the system that have discrete transistor flip flops. We have been substituting 1970’s CMOS chips in many of the timing circuits with good results. There is also a subtle feedback loop between the RF system and the servo system so we have to have both of them functioning well in order to get the head swath to tape timing correct.
We are using PCIe digitizers on a Mac Pro workstation to capture our data so we are able to get high data rate captures up to 180 megasamples per second.
We can do a lot with that but we would have to do a LOT of digital post processing including doing the demodulation in the digital domain, which is NOT going to be easy. Much easier to do in hardware, especially since we have spent the money doing so.
I will be answering some of you guys this week as I am back in the lab now.
Thanks again
Dennis
E.M. Smith
Yep, we are familiar with a lot of that info. I was a test engineer on those older Cray super computer disk drives and have storied to tell about getting the old heads back from TLA’s.
We are in contact with some of them as we have relationships there. Right now we probably have some of the best capability for recovering the type of data that we have in the world.
Michael Ronayne
Michael, funny you should mention Pournelle. I know Jerry fairly well and was with his son Rich this past weekend in Arizona. I also know many of the players in the book “fallen angel” as well, including Gary Hudson.
I passed a pointer to this item to a family friend that worked for Ampex–here is his reply:
Larry – Ampex, in Redwood City, has shrunk considerably. I don’t
know where all of the “old” equipment and documents are. My only
contact with the company is through Debbie Fuentes of Human
Resources. Her phone number is: 650-367-3013. You might try
calling her about locating some of the engineers that worked on the
different tape recorder system that you are interested in. A couple of
names come to mind: Hal Wright (mechanical engineer) and Ernie
Sorenson (electrical engineer). Debbie might know how they may be
contacted. Availability of NASA technical publications can be obtained
from: National Aeronautics and space Administration, Code ATU,
Washington, D.C. 20546. (1966 info)
Clay Hedman
Came across this article about getting the data from the viking landers. Seems like they had the same problem:
“Simply accessing the data turned out to be a challenge – it was stored in a long-forgotten format on magnetic tapes. But eventually Miller tracked down printouts from the original experiments.”
So they did not solve the problem but maybe they found something out in the trying.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1091
I believe that the Department of Biometry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (Ohio) purchased one of these recorders from surplus back in the late 1970’s. I had a work-study job there and was supposed to align the modules so that my boss could record medical telemetry. Not sure that I ever got the darn thing working, but there is a remote possibility that the department still has the documentation for the unit. The man in charge of this project was Dr. Robin Lake.
This could be a real shot in the dark. The old missle subs used 2″ (digital I think) tape drives for the missle system as I understand it. I have never seen one – there might be similar parts in them to what you need. Not sure who made them, maybe some one out there will know. This at least looks like a new search direction, so it might be useful – good luck!