Newly restored Lunar Orbiter 1 image. Originally taken on 23 August 1966 and restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center. Center portion containing Earth has undergone a second level of processing to remove frame lines from the image. Larger image. Credit: NASA/LOIRP
Video: Equipment used to restore images.
8 Replies to “Newly Restored Lunar Orbiter Image of Earth and Moon”
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Are we Going back to the moon? If we do there should be exploration of new resources for energy.
The pictures you are getting are simply amazing.
I hope you’re able to release bitmaps or raw images at some point. I’d love to have a collection to leaf through.
In 1966 I was working for Boeing as a new fresh-out ICBM engineer in Seattle. When this photo was taken, Boeing printed thousands of copies and gave them to employees. I treasured my print for years, but lost it later when we moved to the midwest. What a thrill to see it again, remembering the excitement of space exploration, the rockets we were developing, and the new technology being displayed on a day to day schedule. As aerospace engineers, we saw the best of times in those years. I was blest to be able to work in an industry that reached these achievements.
Great image. Thanks for posting and please keep posting more as they become available. Great job to all those restoring these important pictures.
I think you are the world’s first ‘lunar archeaologists’ if that term applies to your amazing work. You deserve the highest praise for saving the harware needed to read the data, for having the drive and the courage to make it all happen.
How much other data in every branch of human knowledge is already lost because it is stored in some proprietary electronic form that is no longer readable?
Simply gorgeous image, I look forward to seeing the completely restored version.
What is that “tear” down the right side of the frame? Is that from problems reading the tape or was that a transmission failure (or something else)?
Thanks for doing this work – it’s great to see the first Earthrise given the treatment it deserves. It’s odd that it didn’t have nearly the same impact as the Apollo 8 Earthrise a couple of years later. I’ve explored how the photo came to be taken and what impact it made in my book ‘Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth’ (Yale, 2008). I’d be interested in your comments some time.
http://www.earthrise.org.uk
Ahh… 1966. Those were the days. Like Joe Dsida, I was fresh out of graduate school and working on the Saturn V moon rocket booster when the picture was taken. Computing non-equilibrium free electron density in the RP-1 LOX engine exhaust was a challenge. I suppose they can do it now but it was just beyond the capabilities of the tools we had available at the time. Right, Joe? Remember those bridge games at lunch time?