Dennis Wingo: NASA Ames Academy students and their parents visited the LOIRP in Bldg 596 (McMoons) at NASA Ames Research Park last week. Larger image.
NASA Ames Academy Students Visit LOIRP
LOIRP Status Report 22 July 2013
Dennis Wingo: We are running tape today. Here is a scan of a document that I am using to plan the sequence of tape runs. at the top of the page it shows the proportion of the time one ground station was in range of Lunar Orbiter V. Woomera had the majority of the time so we are starting with it. Then Goldstone, and then finally Madrid. There was some duplicate scans during the final readout that overlapped the priority readout data. Thus it is our hope that we will get most of our scans from Woomera and Goldstone and will have to run only a few Madrid tapes. Time will tell. Click on image to enlarge.
Apollo Pioneer David Christensen Visits McMoons
Dennis Wingo: Today we had a real treat. One of my mentors from Huntsville, David Christensen, one of the early members of the von Braun team in Huntsville, came by to visit LORIP today. Dave is one of my hero’s and inspirations for what we are doing here at LORIP. Remember hearing that the Saturn V drawings were lost? Remember that years and years later the story came out that one guy saved them? That one guy was Dave. Dave also has an extensive library of Army Ballistic Missile Agency (Where Von Braun worked) information about the early Saturn designs, the redstone, and space stations.
Dave also has an extensive library of commercial space documentation and he was one of the inspirations for what was called Code C (Commercial) at NASA in the 1980s. Also, he is one of the nicest humans you ever want to meet! Take a look at this picture, can you believe he is 81? He is shown here with our student engineering intern Jacob Gold, bridging the generations of space engineers. The second picture was taken in 1958 and shows Ernst Stuhlinger, von Braun, Hermann Oberth and others seated. Dave is the second from the right standing. Dave published the world’s first space age magazine devoted to telling the public about what was going on in space. One of the covers of “Space” is the third picture. Autographed by Oberth himself!
Video: Oscilloscope Trace of Lunar Orbiter Image Playback
Dennis Wingo: This is a two minute video that shows, about every 42 seconds, a shift in the video. This occurs when the line is scanned to the end of a framelet, over the calibration features that were pre recorded in the tape. Keith has posted images here that show the relationship between the scope trace and the dynamic range of the tapes. This gives us a qualitative measure of the performance of the tape drive. Even in its sub optimized state today, the scope trace almost exactly matches the original transfer function of the spacecraft film, thus giving us a means to evaluate the quality of the analog data derived from the tape.
LOIRP Status Report 15 July 2013
Dennis Wingo: We’re going to get started today on LO-V tapes, slowly at first. Also, we have shipped, as of last Friday, all of our fulfillment for the Rockethub goodies, except for those that did not respond to our email asking for information that we need to complete the shipment. We still have 46 people that have not completed our requests for information. Before the last email it was 109 people, so we had about 60% response last time. I will post those email addresses here and I will send emails to each person and will post on rockethub. Those that do not respond after this time, we will close down the fulfillment. If in six months someone comes in we will of course try and get you your goodies.
LOIRP Article in the Explorers Club Journal
I just got a box of advance copies of the Summer 2013 issue of the Explorers Journal published by the Explorers Club. This issue contains my article on LOIRP: “A Digital Odyssey”. I will try and get a copy posted soon. Larger image
LOIRP Status Report 11 July 2013
Dennis Wingo: Neulyn Moss gets the LOIRP Geek of the Month award for her dazzling ensemble that includes a picture of Buzz Aldrin descending to the surface of the Moon! — with Neulyn Golden Moss. Larger image
Yesterday we found another tape that had some missing framelets and reran it, G2-080. After some wrap up tomorrow we are going to start running Lunar Orbiter V tapes on Monday! We are going to follow our path of running all of the Woomera tapes first. We have no idea how long our last head is going to hold out but we are going to run as much as we can!
LOIRP Status Report 6 July 2013
Dennis Wingo: Austin has been wrapping up the accounting of the captures from Lunar Orbiter II so that we can begin putting together the back end image reconstruction and to capture any frames or framelets that were gakked during capture. We had to recapture G2-061 and M2-019. These will be processed and the framelets entered into the database. If these are the last tapes then sometime this week we will begin captures of the Woomera tapes from LO-V.
The next steps are image reconstruction, then handing those images over to the folks at NLSI for integration into their online database. We are also starting to put together the image analysis to compare our LOII images with similar images taken by the LRO LROC camera to look for new craters. Our student Neulyn Moss has advanced her studies in college and is now starting to learn matlab so that we can do some automation of some of our previous more manual methods of cross referencing images. The new software by the Arizona State done by Mark Robinson’s LROC team is going to be very helpful as well. The Quickmap software by their team is a very impressive piece of software for lunar data analysis. Have a look at http://target.lroc.asu.edu/q3/# I invite all of you who are interested in the Moon to play with their product.
Looks like Neulyn and I are going to be doing the Planetary Data System submittal when our student who volunteered got pulled into a lot more work at Ames and has little free time to help. This is all for now.
Lunar Orbiter Bugle (LO BUGL) October 27, 1966
“WELCOM FELLOW ORBITEERS
Thoughts of Mission B crowd out the memories of Mission A as we get back into the headset harness again and prepare ourselves for training and another successful mission. It’s good to see so many of the “Old Pros” again and to recognize the high level of talent of many of our new team members. But even with all this talent Mission B doesn’t look much like a picnic. Instead it looks like another challenge that will require our best efforts at all times.”
Download full document
Keith Cowing: it was a common habit to refer to the Lunar Orbiter missions as being “A”, “B” etc. as well as “1”, “2” or “I”, “II”.
Video: The Lunar Orbiter: A Spacecraft to Advance Lunar Exploration
25 August 1966 Lunar Orbiter Bugle: Waiting For Earthrise
Keith Cowing: In this excerpt from the 25 August 1966 edition of LO BUGL (The Lunar Orbiter Bugle) the Lunar Orbiter team eagerly awaits the first pictures of the Earth taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 – and how fiction and artistry are about to become reality.
Click on image to enlarge
Related link: Coming Soon: The LO BUGL: Online After 47 Years
Coming Soon: The LO BUGL: Online After 47 Years
Keith Cowing: We have obtained more than 160 pages of the “LO BUGL” i.e. The Lunar Orbiter Bugle. This internal newsetter was produced by NASA, JPL, and Boeing staff during 1966-1967 while the Lunar Orbiter missions were underway. These newsletters contained unofficial news, notes, gossip, jokes, and all of the other sorts of things that a NASA mission team shares with itself – but not necessarily with the public. These newsletters were published using mimeographs and some scanning wizardry will be required to make them all readable online. Stay tuned. Click on image to enlarge.
