LOIRP Status Report 29 August 2013

Dennis Wingo: Status mid day August 29, 2013.
Not running tapes all day today, other paperwork to get through. Did four tapes this morning and it is getting interesting juggling the tapes. An obvious principle for you folks who have been reading this is to maximize the number of images while minimizing the amount of tapes to read and thus head wear. With 477 tapes, Lunar Orbiter V has 60% more tapes than any of the other missions and thus you would think there is a lot of overlap and there are.
Some of the overlap is easy as all you have to do is look at the sequence numbers and the GMT time on a tape to see when two tape machines were running at the same time. Thank God everything was in GMT! However, there are times when a tape would get changed in the middle of a read out (image transmission) from the spacecraft. Thus we lose framelets (parts of an image). You can see some of these losses today when you go to the www.lpi.usra.edu site. By the way, this project would have been impossible without all of their pioneering work to preserve LO images in the 1990’s.
So, what we have after running the Woomera tapes are times, as I have stated before, of overlaps and sometimes the Goldstone tape would stop earlier or run longer than the Woomera tape. Today is one of these times in that we have multiple instances of this overlap that allows us to recover framelets that might otherwise be lost. It causes a headache in our accounting and image runs downstream as we usually do the work by a tape and it is a pain in the rear to merge multiple tapes into an image. Austin had been doing a lot of that work on the backend processing but now with my note leaving here I can not only communicate what is going on to you the reader, this is helping our team internally as I can lay out what I have done with individual tapes and how that integrates into the larger stream of assembling the images.
This is the case today. Here are the tapes run and the juggling between images and tapes.
G5-031, partial capture LOV-068H, 067H, complete capture 066M
G5-032, partial capture LOV-069M, 070H
G5-033, partial capture LOV-070H (completes image and overlaps with W5-139), partial capture 068M (completes image and overlaps with W5-140)
G5-034, partial capture LOV-072H (completes image and overlaps with W5-029), partial capture 070M (completes image and overlaps with W5-030)
The good news is that for G5-033 and 034 I only had to run about 5-10 minutes of each tape rather than 40+ minutes each. This saves enough head life for another tape!

LOIRP Status Report 28 August 2013

Dennis Wingo: Status August 28, 2013 late afternoon.
A pretty good day today, ran tapes G5-23-30 excepting 28-29 which are duplicates of W5-019-20. The tally for today.
G5-023, partial capture LOV-049M, 050H
G5-024, partial capture LOV-050H (completes image), complete capture 048M, partial capture 049H
G5-025, partial capture LOV-049H (almost completes image)
G5-026, partial capture LOV-051M, complete capture 052H
G5-027, partial capture LOV-050M, 049M, complete capture 051H
G5-028, not captured duplicate of W5-019
G5-029, not captured duplicate of W5-020
G5-030, partial capture LOV-067M, 068H
The overall status of the capture of Lunar Orbiter 5 is pretty good. To date we have captured all 163 of the Woomera tapes. We have captured 32 (two from earlier captures) of 158 of the Goldstone tapes. We have also previously captured 6 of 156 of the Madrid tapes.
This means that for all of LOV there are 477 tapes for which we have now captured 201 total tapes captured. It looks like about 2 out of ten of the Goldstone tapes are duplicates so out of 126 remaining that means that at a minimum we really only need to capture about another 102 tapes. For Madrid lets figure that four out of ten are duplicates because of the overlap between both Woomera and Goldstone. So out of 152 remaining Madrid tapes we need to capture about 90 tapes. Thus we have about 192 out of 477 tapes to go so we are basically about 60% through our LOV captures. Lets hope this head holds out!

LOIRP Status Report 27 August 2013

Dennis Wingo: Status, mid day August 27, 2013
Ran a tape yesterday, G5-011. The next two tapes (G5-012,013) are duplicates of W5-005, 006. We are going to run a few tapes today just to kee the ball rolling, we have kinda gotten stacked up as our framelet count for lunar orbiter is now up to over 64,000! (at 126 megabytes per finished framelet, that is a LOT of data i.e. 8 Terabytes).
G5-011, partial capture LOV-018M, 016M complete capture 019H
G5-012, not needed, duplicate of W5-005
G5-013, not needed, duplicate of W5-006
G5-014, partial capture LOV-029H, 028H complete capture 027M
G5-015 is in process now.
End of Day August 27, 2013
Ran several more tapes and found another couple that I don’t have to run. Starting to look like a pattern which makes sense as the end of a Goldstone pass overlaps with the beginning of a Woomera pass. When we get to the Madrid tapes we will have their overlaps with Woomera and Goldstone already done….
Tapes for today since G5-014
G5-015, partial capture LOV-031M, complete capture 032H
G5-016, complete capture LOV-030M, 031H
G5-017, partial capture LOV-029M
G5-018. partial capture LOV-033M, complete capture 034H
G5-019, partial capture LOV-032M,033H
G5-020, partial capture LOV-033H (completes image), partial capture 031M (completes image [from G5-015])
G5-021, partial capture LOV-035M, partial capture 036H (completes image [from W5-012])
G5-022, not captured, overlap with W5-013
Most of G5-021 was an overlap with W5-012 but we still got some framelets that we did not have before, enough to complete another image.
So, we are making progress. With other things I have to do this week we are not going to get a lot done, but we will next week. I still want to get up to about G5-050 this week, which should be doable.

LOIRP Status Report 23 August 2013

Dennis Wingo:
— Status morning of August 23, 2013.
Yesterday I was rummaging through all of our heads and we found one that has some significant life left on it. We went through a long period where we had an anomalous failure that we could never explain where the machine would work just fine but the demodulator would be off frequency, thus preventing the reconstruction of an image. When we would change a head, most of the time it would fix it. Thus we had heads with some life left on them but they would not work.
One of Ken’s friends (Terry) who used to work on FR-900’s told us what was going on and since then we have been able to use some of these half or quarter or three quarter worn heads. We are putting another head on today and hopefully it will have enough life on it to get some more images.
We do this as the head that is mostly dead has had problems on two tapes out of six, and that is anomalously high, so maybe this will solve those problems…..
— Status, end of Day August 23, 2013, 47 years after LO-1-101H
Ran 2.5 tapes today. We had a problem with G5-004 and G5-006 yesterday that we have confirmed is not head related. We can capture these images from Madrid tapes or the other end of Goldstone tapes later.
We have captured G5-007 and G5-010 today. G5-008 and 009 are duplicates of W5-003 and 004. This is what we expected to start seeing but it is gratifying anyway.
G5-007, partial capture LOV-013H, 011M
G5-010, partial capture LOV-019M, complete capture 020H
Next week we will start running more tapes in earnest since we have a head with more meat on it installed.

First Earthrise Photo Taken 47 Years Ago Today

Keith’s note: 47 Years ago today, on 23 August 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 snapped the first photo of Earth as seen from lunar orbit (Larger view). While a remarkable image at the time, the full resolution of the image was never retrieved from the data stored from the mission. In 2008, this earthrise image was restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center. We obtained the original data tapes from the mission (the last surviving set) and restored original FR-900 tape drives to operational condition using both 60s era parts and modern electronics. The following links provide background on the image, its restoration, and reactions to its release.
Here is a comparison of the full image in its original, familiar context (higher res)(print quality). You can download a 1.2 GB version from NASA here. Note: this is a very large file.


Newly Restored Lunar Orbiter Image of Earth and Moon (Detail)
How the Photo Was Taken
House of Representatives Honors Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
Nimbus II and Lunar Orbiter 1 Imagery: A New Look at Earth in 1966
Dumpster Diving for Science, Science Magazine
What Lunar Orbiter 1 Was Seeing on 23 August 1966

LOIRP Status Report 22 August 2013

Dennis Wingo: Status, late afternoon August 22nd.
I was running G5-004 this morning. It was supposed to have 55 minutes of video on it but after about 15 minutes the video went away. It is not the head causing it because I was able to back up and look at the video on the earlier part. I am at this second running G5-005 and this tape looks ok too. The loss of the video kills at least two images but the same data is on a tape with the sequence number 147 so it may be on a Goldstone or Madrid tape later.
I am going to finish G5-005 today….
G5-004, partial capture LOV-006M, 007H
G5-005, partial capture LOV-013M, complete capture 014H
Going to continue to go slowly, watching each tape closely until we wear the head down to the nubbin!