Dennis Wingo: Well today a milestone was reached in that we have now finsihed all 103 Madrid tapes for lunar orbiter III. Prior to this we had completed 79 Woomera tapes for LO-III since May. Additionally, we did seven Lunar Orbiter V tapes looking down into the Copernicus crater and adjacent areas. Today, just as a test we did a Lunar Orbiter III Goldstone tape. So, since May fifth we have digitized a total of 190 tapes.
We aren’t going to charge in and start doing Goldstone tapes right now. Neulyn Moss is putting together a spreadsheet that will show how many framelets (a lunar orbiter high resolution image has 96 framelets and a medium resolution image has 28 framelets) we have for each of the images from LOIII. The way the tapes were recorded, they did not begin and end at the beginning or end of an image. Thus we have many complete images but we also have lots and lots of partial images.
Between the images captured by Madrid and Woomera we have ~80% of the more than 400 total medium and high resolution images from LOIII. There are 80 total Godlstone tapes but we can save a LOT of wear and tear on the drives and heads if we intelligently see how many framelets we have, where the overlaps were between Madrid and Woomera and then see how many framelets we have to go. That way we probably only need to run about 1/3rd of the tapes from Goldstone. This is the value of the spreadsheet that Neulyn is doing right now.
When we are finished with Lunar Orbiter III we will start to put together the submission for the Planetary data system where the raw data and images will be ultimately archived, as well as at the NLSI servers.
Good progress and we hope that we hear about LASER grants soon!!