Dennis Wingo: Status, afternoon January 21, 2014
It’s dead Jim….
The head that is on the FR-900 right now has been running for about 150 hours. It’s tip projection is below the recommended minimum for the lunar orbiter tapes. When the Madrid ground station changed their head after M4-52 the machine quit working. After much pain and suffering and scratching of heads Ken and Terry Smith, another old hand figured out that as the tip’s wear down the velocity changes ((pi*r^2)). Due to the fact that the Lunar Orbiter tapes have a signal that must be demodulated accurate to one hertz, this presents a problem. We have quasi proved this by taking tape M4-111, the last tape for Madrid, putting it on the machine, and adjusting the tip penetration out as far as it will go. That tape is playing back.
However……
This won’t work for all of the tapes and thus I will now work backward from M4-111 to see how many I can get done….
As captain Taggart would say…
Never Give Up! Never Surrender!
Official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP)