Dennis Wingo Lunar Orbiter Status, Monday January 27th 2014
Well, we have quasi completed Lunar Orbiter IV! I state it as quasi as we have found three additional tapes that will not play, no matter which head we use. It is our speculation that after a head was changed at the Madrid ground station that tapes M4-(53-55) somehow had a bad calibration that ended up with a bad recording. We speculate on this as tape M4-056 works just fine and there is no way that if the problem was related to an old vs new head that this would have happened.
Anyway we played tapes M4-(57-60) and tapes M4-(66-79) today. We are missing tapes 80 and 81 so we are done, that is until cleanup after we finish LO-I. We still want to go back and try these tapes again but for now we are done with LO-IV!
The tapes from 66-79 were all from the bad part of the spacecraft downlink where they were having problems so we did not get too much good stuff there, other than some gap filling to flesh out some missing frame lets in medium resolution images. I will put out the tapes vs images in a follow on post.
Here is an image of the first tape from Lunar Orbiter 1 sitting on the FR-900! Away we go!
Official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP)