Hacking Soviet Moon Photos

Scooping the Soviets, Paul Spudis
“The team at Jodrell Bank assumed that the mission was over, surmising that Luna 9 probably hit the Moon too hard or was designed as a crash lander. Then to their astonishment, the probe began transmitting radio signals and the observatory recorded them, uncertain as to their meaning. Lovell thought – suppose these signals were simply an ordinary telefax communication? If these transmissions were pictures of the lunar surface, perhaps the signals the observatory recorded could be read by a commercial facsimile machine. But Jodrell Bank Observatory had no such machine; the observatory was a scientific laboratory, which in those days displayed its received radio signals in the form of line graphs made by paper strip recorders.”