Video: Visiting McMoon’s


NASA NLSI: “I stopped by to visit the folks at McMoon, more widely known as the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project: moonviews.com/ More about the project below, but one of the cool parts is that the images are being restored in an old McDonald’s at NASA Ames Research Center. Also note the nice geek touches like empty pizza boxes 🙂 This project, LOIRP, is recovering decades old data, digitizing data from the Lunar Orbiter mission of the 1960’s, thus bringing up the highest resolution data of the Moon from that time. This will greatly complement all the great Moon missions of this time, including the upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission launching in two weeks!”

LOIRP Profiled by National Geographic


Abandoned McDonald’s Serves Restored NASA Moon Pictures, National Geographic
“Inside this abandoned Mcdonald’s a bit of the past is moving into the future. Where customers used to down Big Macs, an ancient video tape machine spits out grainy images. Behind the counter, next to the Frymaster, there are endless stacks of tape reels. The former fast-food joint has now become mission command for a new effort to save some old NASA history.”

Baruch Samuel Blumberg, Citizen Scientist Extraordinaire

Baruch Blumberg Passes Away, David Morrison, SETI Institute
“I was privileged to have lunch with Barry the day he died. He was attending a conference at Ames discussing exploration planning and its relationships with science and education. He presented a paper on the value of citizen science, where thousands of ordinary people can contribute significantly to science while also enjoying themselves in working with real spacecraft data, such as the high-resolution images now being received from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.”
Baruch Samuel Blumberg 1925-2011, earlier post