Dennis Wingo end of day Thursday January 3, 2014
Well things have gone pretty good today. Started out with W4-096 and am currently running the last Lunar Orbiter IV Woomera tape! The last tape is W4-107 but I skipped W4-102 because of some problems with the control track. It messed up a few frame lets but there is an analog copy of the tape that we can get the missed frame lets from.
If this tape finishes soon we will go ahead and reconfigure the machine to run Lunar Orbiter IV Goldstone tapes and try to run at least one today.
This reduces the number of tapes remaining today down to 477 or less. The countdown is underway!
Remember that the last 280 tapes will go really fast as these are Lunar Orbiter 1 tapes and we only capture the medium res images for the most part.
We recalibrated the FR-900 to run Goldstone tapes late today. This has to happen as in the 1960s no two machines are exactly alike and even though they are supposedly calibrated in the same way, the electronics were not good enough for them to have exactly the same calibration.
Ran two Goldstone tapes, G4-001 and G4-002 with G4-002 overlapping W4-001 for most of the tape. Thus again, like the LO-V tapes the overlaps will not be duplicate captured and thus the number of tapes to run is actually less than the physical number of tapes we have. We are down to 475 tapes to go!
Official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP)