Official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP)
Our friend Andrew Filo of Special Projects from Cupertino, CA has the Lunar Orbiter models almost done for those who donated for the models as your prize. Thanks very kindly and they will be sent out in about a week. We are starting to get everything together for fulfillment of the items that you got for your donations. Looking forward to getting everything to you!
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?”
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.
Some nice folks from Bloomberg TV stopped by McMoons today to shoot a story on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. We’ll let you know when it is set to air.
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
“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
This newly retrieved high resolution image, frame 3199_H2, was taken by Lunar Orbiter 3 on 22 February 1967 at 05:24 GMT LPI reference. Images: [large at LOIRP] [Very Large at NASA NLSI]
This newly retrieved medium resolution image, frame 3198_M, was taken by Lunar Orbiter 3 on 22 February 1967 at 05:24 GMT LPI reference. Images: [large at LOIRP] [Very Large at NASA NLSI]
This newly retrieved medium resolution image, frame 3204_M, was taken by Lunar Orbiter 3 on 22 February 1967 at 08:53 GMT LPI reference. Images: [large at LOIRP] [Very Large at NASA NLSI]
This newly retrieved high resolution image, frame 3199_H3, was taken by Lunar Orbiter 3 on 22 February 1967 at 05:24 GMT LPI reference. Images: [large at LOIRP] [Very Large at NASA NLSI]
According to Wikipedia: Messier is a relatively young lunar impact crater located on the Mare Fecunditatis. The crater has a discernible oblong shape that is not caused by foreshortening. The longer dimension is oriented in an east-west direction. Just to the west lies Messier A, a similar-sized crater with an oblong, doublet form. The longer dimension of this crater is oriented north-south, at right angles to Messier. This crater also has a curved bulge extending to the west. Messier A and B were photographed at high resolution by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter V spacecraft In August of 1967. The oblique angle view is the best available view of the craters.
This newly retrieved high resolution image, frame 5041_H3, was taken by Lunar Orbiter 5 on 10 August 1967 at 16:11 GMT LPI reference. Images: [large at LOIRP] [Very Large at NASA NLSI] Note: the large line arcing across this image is a photographic processing artifact that occurred during automated film processing in lunar orbit.
This newly retrieved high resolution image, frame 5041_H2, was taken by Lunar Orbiter 5 on 10 August 1967 at 16:11 GMT LPI reference. Images: [large at LOIRP] [Very Large at NASA NLSI]
This newly retrieved high resolution image, frame 5041_H1, was taken by Lunar Orbiter 5 on 10 August 1967 at 16:11 GMT LPI reference. Images: [large at LOIRP] [Very Large at NASA NLSI]
