Category: Status Reports

Dennis Wingo: Status, late afternoon September 11, 2013.
Well tape number G5-099 is on the machine right now!
I am going to hand around long enough today to run #100 so that we are that far though LOV. With this tape we are now 263 out of 478 tapes for LOV. Going to keep pushing as long as there are atoms on the leading edge of the head tips!
Status, Tuesday September 10, 2013 morning.
Oh wow, I just realized I have not updated the image capture data since G5-071. Well we are now through G5-091 as of last night so we are well past the half way point on the Goldstone captures. I have to do paperwork today so I may or may not get a few tapes in. The head is holding out. About one out of every four or five tapes has a few servo gaks that we will have to go back and redo once we get another head but I am getting some positive indication that we may get some private funding for a head. More on that should it materialize. If it does I am not pretty confident that we can finish LOV and do at least some of LO-IV. Every tape we get done gets us this much closer to the finish line. I feel like we are in a marathon but can now see a little peep of light at the end of the tunnel!
Images since the last report.
G5-072, partial capture LOV-192M, 191M, complete capture 193H
G5-073, partial capture LOV-191M, 190M, complete capture 192H
G5-074, partial capture LOV-190M (completes image), partial capture 189M, complete capture 191H
G5-075, partial capture LOV-189M, 188M, complete capture 190H
G5-076, partial capture LOV-189H
G5-077, partial capture LOV-187M, 186M, complete capture 188H
G5-078, partial capture LOV-186M (completes image), complete capture 187H
G5-079, partial capture LOV-185M, complete capture 186H
These were all the captures from last Friday, September 6th. There were n overlaps with any other tapes on Friday.
Captures yesterday.
G5-080, partial capture LOV-184M, complete capture 185H
G5-081, partial capture LOV-183M, complete capture 184H
G5-082, complete capture LOV-182M, partial capture 183H
G5-083, partial capture LOV-183H, 181M
G5-084, partial capture LOV-164H (completes capture, overlap with G5-054)
G5-085, partial capture LOV-162M (completes capture, overlap with G5-055)
G5-086, complete capture LOV-161M, 162H
G5-087, complete capture LOV-160M, partial capture 161H
G5-088, partial capture LOV-161H (completes image), complete capture 159M, partial capture 160H
G5-089, partial capture LOV-160H, complete capture 158M, partial capture 159H (completes image, overlaps with M5-046)
G5-90, not needed, overlaps with M5-046-047)
G5-91, not needed, overlaps with M5-048
Some of the overlaps here with Madrid tapes are from Madrid tapes captured earlier this year in order to make the large Copernicus mosaic.
So, here we are at about 62% of the way through our Goldstone tapes. We are still nursing our head to get as far as we can though on every tape I think that we are near the end. We have one more head with a bit of life left on it that we have found so if we get really lucky we will make it all the way through the Goldstone tapes. We have 66 tapes left of which probably 45 we have to play. Keep those positive waves coming!!

Dennis Wingo: Status, end of the evening, Friday September 6, 2013.
After a successful LADEE launch this evening and the party at Ames, we hit another milestone today. We have done exactly half of the Goldstone tapes, which also puts us over halfway of all of the LOV tapes. We ended up finishing G5-79 today. All of the captures were longer than 30 minutes today, no overlaps or dupes. I even did something stupid, which was for some reason G5-073 had to be done over again. It had several gaks as well so that one is not going to come out that well. We had a few more servo gaks on other tapes. If it gets any worse we are going to call it a day on this head as it wastes time if we are going to have to do over.

Dennis Wingo: Status end of day, September 5, 2013
Got through image G5-071 today. The head held out and maybe we have a few more left in old bessie…..
We went to see our Copernicus image, the big 23 gigabyte one, on the NASA Hyperwall 2 today. Got some good pictures, Keith will post them tomorrow.
Will post the image numbers tomorrow as well….
– Status mid day, September 5, 2013
A funny thing happened on the way to the tapes, we had a whole tape with nothing but black, an unexposed image. This would have been LOV-218H.
The next image, 216M has some weird pattern on the image, which according to the ground team chatter is the Bimat supply roll. Apparently this the last two images wound around the supply roll which cased the weird pattern. You can see this pattern on the existing image at: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/images/preview/5216_med.jpg
This means that we are half way through the LOV film roll and are now running the final readout images. Today we were able to skip G5-060-63 because 60-62 were duplicates with Woomera images and G5-063 had nothing but a blank image on it. Thus our first real capture today is on G5-064. As stated yesterday, the halfway point in tape count is G5-079 so we obviously have many tapes and overlaps to go. This makes tape 227 out of 478 for LOV, so we are making progress! The head is not going to last much longer though, possibly no longer than today.

Dennis Wingo: Mid day Wednesday September 4, 2013.
The tape list is getting quite long so I have to deal with it. I made a mistake that I caught yesterday so have to incorporate that as well…..
G5-035, partial capture LOV-087H, 086H, 083H complete capture 085M (some overlap with W5-136)
G5-036, complete capture, LOV-092M, partial capture 093H
G5-037, partial capture LOV-112H, 111H, complete capture 110M
G5-038, partial capture LOV-115M, 116H, (completes 116H) (overlap with W5-122)
G5-039, partial capture LOV-114M, 115H (duplicate capture with W5-123 but did anyway as there were gaks on the W5-123 tape)
G5-040, partial capture LOV-119M (completes image, and overlaps with W5-118) also 120H (completes image and overlaps with W5-117)
We may have to recapture W5-122 as I made a mistake with the reading of that image and did not capture framelets 765-700 as I should have because I had the wrong image number listed.
G5-041, not needed, overlap W5-118, 119
G5-042, not needed, overlap W5-118
G4-043, not needed, overlap W5-042
G5-044, partial capture LOV-139M, 140H
G5-045, partial capture LOV-140H, complete capture 138M, 139H
G5-046, partial capture LOV-137M, 138H
Those are from yesterday. So far today…..
G5-047, not needed but captured partial LOV-143H (five frame lets), it is overlapped with W5-112 and 113)
G5-048, partial capture LOV-142H (several gaks due to control track problems)
G5-049, partial capture LOV-140M, complete capture 141H, 139M
G5-050, not needed overlap W5-108
G5-051, not needed overlap W5-110,-051
G5-052, not needed, duplicate W5-110,-111
G5-053, partial capture LOV-160H, 158M, 165H (ground station problems made from framelets 421-405 messy) (158M not in LPI database)
G5-054, partial capture LOV-163M, complete capture 164H
This is all so far though G5-055 is in process.
We don’t know how much longer the head will last but we are pushing forward. It could fail any minute. So far now we are well over 1/3rd of the way through the Goldstone tapes, and mostly because we found this old cast away head. It is having problems with the control track so probably we won’t refurbish it again so we are going to run it for all it is worth! To get half way through the Goldstone tapes we have to make it to G5-079. Keep yer fingers crossed!

Dennis Wingo: Late afternoon September 3, 2013
Well we got through (or about to finish) from G5-035-44 today. Lots of overlaps and duplicates so the amount of tape run was not really that much. Was able to close some gaps on several images but also found that I had made an identification mistake before on an overlap. Will fix that but will have to rerun part of a Woomera tape that I had skipped before.
I have to go to a doctor appointment so will lay it out tomorrow. The head we have now is starting to get a bit sketchy so don’t know how many more tapes we can get on this one. Not too bad so far and I at least want to get half way through the Goldstone tapes. If anyone is feeling like it we sure need another donation for a head!

Dennis Wingo: Status mid day August 29, 2013.
Not running tapes all day today, other paperwork to get through. Did four tapes this morning and it is getting interesting juggling the tapes. An obvious principle for you folks who have been reading this is to maximize the number of images while minimizing the amount of tapes to read and thus head wear. With 477 tapes, Lunar Orbiter V has 60% more tapes than any of the other missions and thus you would think there is a lot of overlap and there are.
Some of the overlap is easy as all you have to do is look at the sequence numbers and the GMT time on a tape to see when two tape machines were running at the same time. Thank God everything was in GMT! However, there are times when a tape would get changed in the middle of a read out (image transmission) from the spacecraft. Thus we lose framelets (parts of an image). You can see some of these losses today when you go to the www.lpi.usra.edu site. By the way, this project would have been impossible without all of their pioneering work to preserve LO images in the 1990’s.
So, what we have after running the Woomera tapes are times, as I have stated before, of overlaps and sometimes the Goldstone tape would stop earlier or run longer than the Woomera tape. Today is one of these times in that we have multiple instances of this overlap that allows us to recover framelets that might otherwise be lost. It causes a headache in our accounting and image runs downstream as we usually do the work by a tape and it is a pain in the rear to merge multiple tapes into an image. Austin had been doing a lot of that work on the backend processing but now with my note leaving here I can not only communicate what is going on to you the reader, this is helping our team internally as I can lay out what I have done with individual tapes and how that integrates into the larger stream of assembling the images.
This is the case today. Here are the tapes run and the juggling between images and tapes.
G5-031, partial capture LOV-068H, 067H, complete capture 066M
G5-032, partial capture LOV-069M, 070H
G5-033, partial capture LOV-070H (completes image and overlaps with W5-139), partial capture 068M (completes image and overlaps with W5-140)
G5-034, partial capture LOV-072H (completes image and overlaps with W5-029), partial capture 070M (completes image and overlaps with W5-030)
The good news is that for G5-033 and 034 I only had to run about 5-10 minutes of each tape rather than 40+ minutes each. This saves enough head life for another tape!

Dennis Wingo: Status August 28, 2013 late afternoon.
A pretty good day today, ran tapes G5-23-30 excepting 28-29 which are duplicates of W5-019-20. The tally for today.
G5-023, partial capture LOV-049M, 050H
G5-024, partial capture LOV-050H (completes image), complete capture 048M, partial capture 049H
G5-025, partial capture LOV-049H (almost completes image)
G5-026, partial capture LOV-051M, complete capture 052H
G5-027, partial capture LOV-050M, 049M, complete capture 051H
G5-028, not captured duplicate of W5-019
G5-029, not captured duplicate of W5-020
G5-030, partial capture LOV-067M, 068H
The overall status of the capture of Lunar Orbiter 5 is pretty good. To date we have captured all 163 of the Woomera tapes. We have captured 32 (two from earlier captures) of 158 of the Goldstone tapes. We have also previously captured 6 of 156 of the Madrid tapes.
This means that for all of LOV there are 477 tapes for which we have now captured 201 total tapes captured. It looks like about 2 out of ten of the Goldstone tapes are duplicates so out of 126 remaining that means that at a minimum we really only need to capture about another 102 tapes. For Madrid lets figure that four out of ten are duplicates because of the overlap between both Woomera and Goldstone. So out of 152 remaining Madrid tapes we need to capture about 90 tapes. Thus we have about 192 out of 477 tapes to go so we are basically about 60% through our LOV captures. Lets hope this head holds out!

Dennis Wingo: Status, mid day August 27, 2013
Ran a tape yesterday, G5-011. The next two tapes (G5-012,013) are duplicates of W5-005, 006. We are going to run a few tapes today just to kee the ball rolling, we have kinda gotten stacked up as our framelet count for lunar orbiter is now up to over 64,000! (at 126 megabytes per finished framelet, that is a LOT of data i.e. 8 Terabytes).
G5-011, partial capture LOV-018M, 016M complete capture 019H
G5-012, not needed, duplicate of W5-005
G5-013, not needed, duplicate of W5-006
G5-014, partial capture LOV-029H, 028H complete capture 027M
G5-015 is in process now.
End of Day August 27, 2013
Ran several more tapes and found another couple that I don’t have to run. Starting to look like a pattern which makes sense as the end of a Goldstone pass overlaps with the beginning of a Woomera pass. When we get to the Madrid tapes we will have their overlaps with Woomera and Goldstone already done….
Tapes for today since G5-014
G5-015, partial capture LOV-031M, complete capture 032H
G5-016, complete capture LOV-030M, 031H
G5-017, partial capture LOV-029M
G5-018. partial capture LOV-033M, complete capture 034H
G5-019, partial capture LOV-032M,033H
G5-020, partial capture LOV-033H (completes image), partial capture 031M (completes image [from G5-015])
G5-021, partial capture LOV-035M, partial capture 036H (completes image [from W5-012])
G5-022, not captured, overlap with W5-013
Most of G5-021 was an overlap with W5-012 but we still got some framelets that we did not have before, enough to complete another image.
So, we are making progress. With other things I have to do this week we are not going to get a lot done, but we will next week. I still want to get up to about G5-050 this week, which should be doable.

Dennis Wingo:
— Status morning of August 23, 2013.
Yesterday I was rummaging through all of our heads and we found one that has some significant life left on it. We went through a long period where we had an anomalous failure that we could never explain where the machine would work just fine but the demodulator would be off frequency, thus preventing the reconstruction of an image. When we would change a head, most of the time it would fix it. Thus we had heads with some life left on them but they would not work.
One of Ken’s friends (Terry) who used to work on FR-900’s told us what was going on and since then we have been able to use some of these half or quarter or three quarter worn heads. We are putting another head on today and hopefully it will have enough life on it to get some more images.
We do this as the head that is mostly dead has had problems on two tapes out of six, and that is anomalously high, so maybe this will solve those problems…..
— Status, end of Day August 23, 2013, 47 years after LO-1-101H
Ran 2.5 tapes today. We had a problem with G5-004 and G5-006 yesterday that we have confirmed is not head related. We can capture these images from Madrid tapes or the other end of Goldstone tapes later.
We have captured G5-007 and G5-010 today. G5-008 and 009 are duplicates of W5-003 and 004. This is what we expected to start seeing but it is gratifying anyway.
G5-007, partial capture LOV-013H, 011M
G5-010, partial capture LOV-019M, complete capture 020H
Next week we will start running more tapes in earnest since we have a head with more meat on it installed.

Dennis WIngo: Well, can’t resist continuing on. Running G5-003 right now. Looking good so far. There are two tapes in this sequence so I am going to do both of them today.
G5-003, partial capture LOV-008H, 006M
One thing that I am very much looking forward to is to assemble an image and make a photographic print of one of these full moon pictures of the far side of the Moon. With the greater dynamic range of our grey scales, these images should look spectacular!
End of Day
Well, can’t resist continuing on. Running G5-003 right now. Looking good so far. There are two tapes in this sequence so I am going to do both of them today.
G5-003, partial capture LOV-008H, 006M
One thing that I am very much looking forward to is to assemble an image and make a photographic print of one of these full moon pictures of the far side of the Moon. With the greater dynamic range of our grey scales, these images should look spectacular!

Dennis Wingo: I couldn’t help it. We needed to know the sequences in the tapes for Goldstone as the sequence numbers that we have used forever are missing. So, I ran the first Lunar Orbiter V Goldstone tape today with the nearly dead head. It worked pretty well. So it was captured and one more high res image down!
G5-001, partial capture LOV-006H (90 framelets)
We got almost a complete high res image and I can now figure out what sequence number it is from (002) and thus know what is coming next and how that fits with the Woomera data that we already have.
End of day update. G4-001 looked pretty good and there are two tapes in that sequence. Soooo….
G5-002, complete capture LOV-005H
Note that image 005H is the lowest numbered high resolution frame for Lunar Orbiter V. The Goldstone captures started three days before the Woomera ones for some reason so it bears to reason that for a while Goldstone has images that don’t exist with the tapes we have already run. I may run another tape or two just to see how far I can go before the head completely dies, that is, if the image quality is still good.

Dennis Wingo: Doing a bunch of clean up today, paperwork and processing framelets! That, to us, amazing image of the horizon from LOV-041, was a highlight. Austin is processing the entire medium resolution image and it should look great in full resolution.
We did run one tape today as the medium resolution image LOV-041m was spread across two tapes and was missing a few framelets. So our head, like Wesley in the movie princess bride, is just mostly dead. We use it when we absolutely have to in order to grab critical pieces of images. So we processed tape G5-145 today. Since we only needed a few framelets off it it, that one is considered done as it overlapped W5-154 and W5-155 and W5-018. Looks like this may help prove the thesis of a lot of overlaps in LOV. It was easy to tell the overlap as the capture time from all of the ground stations is in GMT time.
Here are the images for the tapes that were run last Thursday and Friday that are not recorded yet.
W5-151, partial capture 044M, 045H
W5-152, partial capture LOV-043M, 042M, complete capture 044H
W5-153, partial capture LOV-042M, 043H
W5-154, partial capture LOV-043H (completes image), partial capture 041M,
W5-155, partial capture LOV-041M (G5-145 completes this image), complete capture 042H
W5-156, complete capture LOV-040M, 041H (Messier and Messier A high res)
W5-157, complete capture LOV-039M, partial capture 040H,
W5-158, complete capture LOV-038M, 039H, partial capture 040H (completes image)
W5-159, partial capture LOV-037M, complete capture 038H
W5-160, complete capture 036M, 037H, partial capture 035M
W5-161, partial capture LOV-012H
W5-162, partial capture LOV-012H, 011H, complete capture 010M
W5-163, partial capture LOV-011H, 010H, complete capture 009M
It annoys me that toward the end here they changed tapes in the middle of a high resolution or medium resolution frame, even though the missing pieces are found on other tapes.