Dennis Wingo: Andrew Ball from ESA visited us today to collect his large Lunar Orbiter image as a thank you gift for his financial support of our project.
Another LOIRP Supporter Visits
LOIRP Supporter Michael Wright Stops By McMoons
Dennis Wingo: “Michael Wright came by and picked up his image this past week and we took a picture of him with our FR-900 machine. We thank Michael for his support! He also brought by some pictures of paintings by LOIRP benefactor Don Davis, of the iconic L5 habitat images from Gerry O’Neil’s studies in the 70’s. Many of us are Gerry’s kids…”
LOIRP Supporter Certificates
Dennis Wingo: “Today has been organization and logistics day for shipping stuff. We have all of the prints and their certificates done for the $1000, $750, and $500 prizes. We are missing some addresses and even names! I will email those folks tonight. The images below are your certificates. The gold rimmed certificates are for the $5000, and $1000 prizes and the rest get the certificates with the green border. Stuff will start being mailed tomorrow we promise….”
What Do Star Trek and Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project Have in Common?
We’re especially happy that William Shatner had these nice words to say about us. You see, we at LOIRP and McMoons have a favorite Star Trek Episode: “City on the Edge of Forever”. As you will recall Kirk, Spock and McCoy go back in time to the 1930s. At one point Spock has to hack his 23rd century tricorder with early 20th century electronics to get data off of it. In our case, we used early 21st century electronics to hack mid 20th century electronics to gain access to 45 year old data. Like Spock and Kirk, we had to do some dumpster diving to get parts. We like to make old things work to explore space. Check out our RocketHub page.
Continue reading “What Do Star Trek and Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project Have in Common?”
William Shatner Tweets His Support for Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
We Need Your Help To Complete the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
We are currently enaged in a crowdfunding campaign with RocketHub. Please take the time to visit our RocketHub page. We hope you will consider our project important enough to support.
Thanks To You We’re Ordering a New Head
Thanks so very much for your support. Though we are well short of our goal at this time, we have raised enough money to do the most essential thing that we have to do, which is to order the refurbishment of one head. Tony Korte of www.videomagnetics.com and his great staff of people are a critical part of our overall team. Without Tony there would be no more heads for our FR-900 machine and they have worked with us over the past few years to keep our machines going.
The first tranche of money raised is going to go to Tony to refurbish one head. We need more to finish the project but this will give us our first leg up in moving forward. My latest picture shows the head that your generosity has funded to get refurbished. There is an incredibly delicate and technical art to head refurbishment and the FR-900 is the most technically challenging head refurbish that they do for the old Ampex machines. This is because the FR-900 is not simply a video recorder, it is an instrumentation recorder with higher bandwidth than the commercial video machines. This means that the tolerances are tighter and the accuracy of head alignment must be better than on the video machines. This obviously costs more money.
With your help we can get more of these heads refurbished and pay our people to be able to transfer these images!
Dennis
Please Help Support the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
“We are looking for people to help us complete the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). We call this technoarchaeology – mining the past to support science in the future. Between 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five Lunar Orbiter missions to the Moon. Their mission was to photograph the lunar surface to help identify future Apollo mission landing sites. The spacecraft carried 70mm photographic film which was developed automatically in lunar orbit aboard the spacecraft. The developed film was then scanned with a light beam and this modulated a signal which was sent back to Earth.” More at RocketHub
NASA Science Mission Directorate AA John Grunsfeld Visits LOIRP
John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, visited the LOIRP on 10 December 2012.
August Uribe, Soethby’s, Visits LOIRP
August Uribe (R), Senior Vice President at Soethby’s and also a member of the Explorers Club, visited the LOIRP on 10 December 2012. On the left is LOIRP engineer Ken Zin.
Saving History Before It Is Gone
Fading History: Vintage Films And Photos Crumbling To Dust, Forbes
Between 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to the moon to capture images before the arrival of Apollo 11, which landed on the lunar suface July 20, 1969. Forty years later, while preparing for the historic anniversary, NASA began a frantic search for those images after a well-publicized loss of the original video of the Apollo 11 landing. Fortunately, the Lunar Orbiter tapes were found. Because the compatible tape players hadn’t been manufactured since 1975, it took a multi-year effort to refurbish a player in order to read the obsolete tapes. The results were stunning images at digital resolutions never seen before.
Lunar Orbiter Image Recover Project Status Report 17 August 2012
Dennis Wingo: Well today a milestone was reached in that we have now finsihed all 103 Madrid tapes for lunar orbiter III. Prior to this we had completed 79 Woomera tapes for LO-III since May. Additionally, we did seven Lunar Orbiter V tapes looking down into the Copernicus crater and adjacent areas. Today, just as a test we did a Lunar Orbiter III Goldstone tape. So, since May fifth we have digitized a total of 190 tapes.
We aren’t going to charge in and start doing Goldstone tapes right now. Neulyn Moss is putting together a spreadsheet that will show how many framelets (a lunar orbiter high resolution image has 96 framelets and a medium resolution image has 28 framelets) we have for each of the images from LOIII. The way the tapes were recorded, they did not begin and end at the beginning or end of an image. Thus we have many complete images but we also have lots and lots of partial images.
Continue reading “Lunar Orbiter Image Recover Project Status Report 17 August 2012”