Keith’s note: On Thursday, 10 December 2009, we conducted a live webcast from the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) at “McMoon’s” i.e. Building 596 at the NASA Ames Research Park.
Dennis Wingo and I give you a tour of our project including a walk through of the abandoned McDonald’s that has been our base of operations since 2008. We show you how we rack tapes, play them back, capture the data on a computer, and then stitch the image framelets together. You can look over our shoulders and see the imagery as it appears on one of our old TV monitors. We’ve picked an especially interesting tape to show you. Eventually this image will be posted online at LPI and submitted to the NSSDC.
This project has been funded and supported by a bunch of imaginative folks at ESMD, IPP, NLSI, ARC, SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and Odyssey Moon with assistance from a range of people ranging from retired Lunar Orbiter project personnel and Lockheed Martin employees to local high school and college students. Soon, we expect to have two tape drives fully operational and to be able to produce images on a daily basis.
Oh yes, in case you are wondering, I donate my time (and money) to this project. What fun. Its like bringing a time machine back to life in a high tech junkyard. We are looking to begin some pervasive EPO in coordination with NLSI and the Challenger Center for Space Science Education in the very near future.
If I’m not mistaken, I noticed on the wall a picture of Mare Orientale. This is probably picture H4187med. Can you post them on the web? This is one of the most beautiful pictures of the moon ever taken.
Are there any data sets stored on 2 inch tape readable by your Ampex FR-900 drives other than the Lunar Orbiter data and Nimbus weather satellite data?
Keith and Dennis
Wonderful research….would love to be working on it…perhaps in the near future when you get public computers/contributors involved. Continued success!
John
I utterly liked reading about Live Webcast From McMoon’s (MoonViews – Providing Imagery and Data For Lunar Exploration) and thought it was well worth the read. The only other site I found on AOL wasnt as good as this one, thanks.