Dennis Wingo Lunar Orbiter Status, end of day, February 20, 2014
I am pleased to announce that we have completed the primary tape capture portion of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. When we started this we thought we would be lucky to get half the tapes done. It is a testament to the great work of our team and those who (both in the private and public sector) who have believed in our project and through these now five and a half years, provided us the funding to allow us to get to this point.
There will still be a few tapes run as we look at where we have poor captures and see if we can do better. We have learned a LOT about the tape machines since we started and some of the early captures could use a rerun….
This is not the end of the project as we still have a ton of digital processing to do, and the submittal to the planetary data system. However, this is straightforward though time consuming. Our greatest fear was that we would lose the ability to run tapes and now we can put that fear to rest.
Again, thanks to all who have supported us and we will begin putting images on the NASA SSERVI server en masse soon…..
A special thanks to both Austin Epps , Keith Cowing and Ken Kenneth Zin this project would have been impossible without your diligent work…
Dennis Ray Wingo
LOIRP Co-lead
Official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP)