The LOIRP Project has reached a major milestone of having two Ampex FR-900 Instrumentation Tape Drives operational at once. This will allow us to accelerate the production of images. This is probably the first time in 30 years that two FR-900s have been operational in the same room at the same time.
LOIRP Works To Bring Second FR-900 Tape Drive Online
Keith’s note: we are working to get our second FR-900 tape drive restored and operational. Once that is accomplished the LOIRP will embark upon a new program with a dramatically enhanced capability to retrieve – and release images.
Image: This is one of our original FR-900 Ampex heads with two new preamps. Part of our upgrade program – a Silicon Transistor Preamp and Germanium Preamp
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Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (Presentation at HackerDojo
Dennis Wingo from the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) will be teaching a class at HackerDojo in 4 November 2009.
HackerDojo is located at 140 South Whisman Road in Mountain View, CA (Map) from 6 to 7:30 pm.
We hope to stream this presentation live.
LOIRP Presentation at NASA GSFC
Lunar Orbiter Featured in MIT’s Technology Review Magazine
Surface Restoration – Engineers restore high-resolution photos of the Moon, Technology Review (paid subscribers only)
“The images of the Moon’s surface taken by five NASA Lunar Orbiter satellites in 1966 and 1967 are still among the most detailed ever made. The original analog data, beamed down to Earth to plan landing sites for the Apollo missions, was recorded on magentic tapes that collected dust for decades and were nearly discarded. Now a team of engineers at an abandoned McDonald’s at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, CA is processing the data using restored and custom-built equipment, enabling a public that saw only snapshopts of these historic images to view them at their full resolution for the first time.”
SMART-1 Mapped Crash Scene of Upcoming LCROSS Impact
The European Space Agency’s SMART-1 team has released an image of the future impact site of NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). LCROSS will search for water ice on the Moon by making two impacts into a crater named Cabeus A at the lunar South Pole. The impacts are scheduled for 11:30 am UT on 9 October 2009.
Bjoern Grieger, the liaison scientist for SMART-1’s AMIE camera, and Project Scientist Bernard Foing have searched through SMART-1’s database for images of Cabeus A, taken four years ago at conditions where solar elevation and direction were similar to those of LCROSS impact. The SMART-1 image is at high resolution as the spacecraft was at its closest distance of 500 km from the South Pole. The SMART-1 image of the LCROSS target was discussed last week at lunar sessions of the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Potsdam, Germany. More
Lunar Orbiter’s Kodak Camera Profiled
The Kodak Lunar Orbiter Camera, American Society of Cinematographers Blog
“The recent media attention given to the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, with its dramatic restored video of Neil Armstrong’s first steps onto the lunar surface, has re-ignited our nation’s interest in extra-terrestrial exploration. But this mission would not have been possible had it not been for a series of lunar surface mapping missions that were made several years before. It is a story that is not as dramatic as that of the first humans to walk on the moon. But it is a fascinating story, nonetheless, of the way that the entire Apollo program pushed beyond the then perceived limits of technology. And the Eastman Kodak Company was a major player.”
“The recent AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) symposium held at the Dunn Theater of the AMPAS Pickford Center in Hollywood featured jaw-dropping presentations by Al Sturm and Ralph Sargent of the history of this program as well as the forensic-like work to find and restore its lost images. It is this latter theme I will take up soon along with the recent new photos also taken by a high resolution Kodak digital camera.”
LOIRP Releases Recovered Lunar Orbiter III Image of Surveyor 1 On the Lunar Surface
This image (LO3_194_H3) was taken by Lunar Orbiter III on 22 February 1967 at 5:24:14 GMT at an altitude of 54.27 km above the lunar surface. High resolution frame 3 clearly shows the Surveyor 1 spacecraft sitting on the lunar surface complete with a long shadow.
Surveyor 1 landed on the Moon on 2 June 1966 in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) at 2.45 degrees South latitude, 43.22 degrees West longitude.
Larger view
This image has been recovered in its original high resolution format by LOIRP staff from original Lunar Orbiter project data tapes using restored tape drive hardware and will eventually be submitted to the PDS (Planetary Data System).
A full resolution version of this image will be placed online at the NASA Lunar Science Institute.
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) is located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. Funding and support for this project has been provided by NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA Innovative Partnerships Program, NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, Odyssey Moon LLC, SkyCorp Inc., and SpaceRef Interactive Inc.
For more information on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) visit https://moonviews.wpenginepowered.com
For information on NASA’s Lunar Science Institute visit http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/
For information on NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate visit http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/
Surveyor I: Location and Indentification, Science
Science 11 August 1967: Vol. 157 no. 3789 pp. 681-684
DOI: 10.1126/science.157.3789.681
L. Harold Spradley, R. Steinbacher, M. Grolier, C. Byrne
Surveyor I landed on the lunar surface on 2 June 1966 and obtained more than 11,000 pictures of the environment with its television camera. The same region was photographed by the 24-inch (61-centimeter) camera of Orbiter III on 22 February 1967. Surveyor I has been located in these Orbiter photographs; its image was found and all search and identification criteria were satisfied by the site.
Related Document
Lunar coordinates of Surveyor 1, Charles J. Byrne, 28 April 1967
Chandrayaan-I Spacecraft Loses Radio Contact
Radio contact with Chandrayaan-I spacecraft was abruptly lost at 0130 Hrs (IST) on August 29, 2009. Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore received the data from Chandrayaan-I during the previous orbit upto 0025 Hrs (IST). Detailed review of the Telemetry data received from the spacecraft is in progress and health of the spacecraft subsystems is being analysed. More
Another Example of 40 Year Old Data With Modern Relevance
40-year-old data tackles very modern physics problem, Ars Technica
“The Large Hadron Collider is still going through a painful commissioning process–coming online in time for the winter shutdown is probably not what researchers had in mind when they broke it the first time. So, what is a physicist to do when the shiny toys are still being polished? Sit around at the pub and gossip about old experiments, of course. One such session has ended with Jorg Jaeckel, from Durham University, taking a new look at 40-year-old data from a classical electrostatics experiment. He found that this data provided the strongest constraints on a particular set of particles so far, thus proving that some experiments age very gracefully indeed.”
LOIRP and LRO Confirm That Humans Walked on the Moon
Yesterday the LRO team released a new image of the Apollo 14 landing site. You can clearly make out the paths that the crew walked as well as the location of the Apollo 14 Antares Lunar Module Descent Stage.
In June 2009 LOIRP issued its own view and analysis of this landing site – as seen by Lunar Orbiter III back in 1967.
Comparing our high resolution image of the site with that taken by LRO clearly shows no feature where Antares’ Descent Stage now stands [larger image]. While the resolution of the Lunar Orbiter image (0.8 meters/pixel) would probably not reveal astronaut tracks in great detail, we’re rather certain that it would have seen an object the size of Antares’ Descent Stage.
As such, we’re pretty certain that the Apollo 14 mission landed on the Moon!
Technoarchaeology: Finding The Right Image in a Room Full of Tapes
Image: a portion of our set of Lunar Orbiter data tapes at McMoon’s – an abandoned McDonalds onsite at NASA Ames Research Park, home of the LOIRP – Lunar Orbiter Image recovery Project.
Here at the LOIRP (Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Process) project there are two different phases of the image retrieval process that are distinct from each other. The second phase, the production of the vast majority of all the of the Lunar Orbiter images, will simply involve putting tapes on the tape drive machines, acquiring the data, and processing them into images.
However, we’re still in the first phase of the project where we need to search through tapes in a painstaking fashion just to find the images we are interested in downloading. Once we find what we are looking for, downloading is a snap and can be done in a matter of hours.
Finding the images using a jumbled nomenclature and labeling system last used more than 40 years ago is part of what we call “Technoarchaeology”.
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