Posted on 07/09/2009 5:32:33 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative
Liquid nitrogen, vegetable steamers, Macintosh workstations and old, refrigerator-size tape drives. These are just some of the tools a new breed of Space Age archeologists is using to sift through the digital debris from the early days of NASA, mining the information in ways unimaginable when it was first gathered four decades ago.
At stake is data that could show Earth's risk of an asteroid strike, shed light on global warming and -- perhaps -- even satisfy those who think the moon landings were a hoax.
The most visible of the archeologists is arguably Dennis Wingo, head of Skycorp Inc., a small aerospace engineering firm in Huntsville, Ala. He's the driving force behind the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, operating out of a decommissioned McDonald's (since dubbed McMoon's) at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The project's goal is to recover and enhance as many of the original lunar landing images as possible.
Between 1966 and 1967, five unmanned probes were sent into lunar orbit to map possible landing sites within the moon's equatorial regions at one-meter resolution and to map the rest of the surface at a resolution of 40 meters or better, Wingo explains. Those probes, known as Lunar Orbiters, sent back about 1,800 images that modern technology should be able to greatly improve.
.............
The original black-and-white images were shot on 70mm film that was automatically developed and scanned within the robot spacecraft. The signal from the scanner was sent to Earth and was then displayed as partial frames on a monitor. Each monitor image was then captured with a film camera. These pictures were fit together, and then another picture was taken of the finished mosaic. Each step imposed a certain amount of image degradation.
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
I couldn't fit the whole title into the alloted space. I am posting it here in order to maximize the amount of material I can excerpt.
The lost NASA tapes: Restoring lunar images after 40 years in the vault
A Mac Pro and 40-year-old tape drives are helping restore the original Lunar Orbiter tapes
Detail of the Earthrise picture taken by
the first Lunar Orbiter in 1966, as
r endered at the time.
Detail of the Earthrise picture taken by
the first Lunar Orbiter in 1966, rendered
with modern technology.
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Dennis Wingo, how apropos
Nope. you must use 64KB core memory.
cool.. old pics..
yahoo had audio of the crashed lunar lander that was on the same day or something as Apollo 11... interesting... it went crash though
http://www.moonviews.com/
Thanks for posting this article.
And I did go and read it in it’s entirety.
It was really worth spending the time to read all 5 pages.
Everyone should.
The original image seems to show more detail than the ‘enhanced’ version, which seems to have lost most of the contrast.
They're trying to hide the Arctic ice. ;-)
We have been contacted by Dave Gallaher of the National Snow and Ice science data center in Boulder Colorado concerning our work to line up the scan lines of our images. The early Nimbus prototype climate spacecraft used a method similar to our own to record and reconstruct images. If the Snow and Ice Data Center can reconstruct the Nimbus images from the 1960's this will push our satellite based polar icecap information from 1979 back another 13 years, providing a significant increase in the quality of climate data.There is a possibility that the Nimbus spacecraft imaged the polar regions of the earth on the exact same day and near the same time as our now famous lunar orbiter image of the Earth as seen from the Moon. We have one image from them that is only a couple of weeks older than the August 23, 1966 image of the Earth that we have reconstructed. If the Snow and Ice Center has an image from the same day, the possibility exists to generate a global cloud cover image of the earth from that day, which would be the oldest image of this type. This will have a value to the science community as the mid 1960's was the depth of a global cooling climate interlude that is very sparsely known from the remote sensing and climate science perspective.
BTW, Wingo is a bigtime global warming skeptic.
ping
You're just looking at the thumbnail image I posted. If you follow the links there are much higher resolution images of the pictures I posted. The reprocessed pictures are much better.
Really? I thought he hoped to prove global warming with the restored data
Thanks for the info about Nimbus. My Dad worked on that project at GE, then later on ERTS (renamed Landsat). He took me into work to watch shake table tests that simulated the rocket launch. I remember when they swept through about 5 Hz (IIRC) the folded solar panels just flopped around like chicken wings. As soon as they hit 6 or 7 Hz, they settled down and stopped banging around. I always wondered how they didn’t self destruct in the shroud on take-off. That was pretty exciting stuff for an ME undergraduate student studying dynamics.
Macs in space ping.
My dad built the attitude control valves for ERTS. (Don't tell, but I got to hold a couple of them in my (gloved) hand)!
Trivia question:
What were the real first words transmitted from the surface of the Moon? (after "contact light" and before the words in the official transcript)...
BTTT for tomorrow
One more word out of you and I'm turning this thing around!
- Traveler
LOL!
(Well, it wasn’t ‘Are we there yet???’)
LOL. Sure it wasn’t “Hold mah beer”??
Great. More pics to make Richard Hoagland foam at the mouth...
Too bad they lost all the original video. Only a government agency could be so incompetent that they’d lose the only hi-quality video of one of the most important moments in human history.
Wasn’t you that was telling me about this at the Christmas party?
Yup, I remember seeing some of those pics when I worked at NASA. Worked nights for a while on the computers and the pics were on some of the desks of the engineers.
Of course I was just snooping around.
“Engine stop”
“Houston, Tranquillity Base.”
Close:
"Cycle the Parker valve." - it's how they shut off the engine.
Dad didn't build that particular valve, but the same valve on all subsequent missions.
Thank God the other valve he built was never used...
With all due respect to your dad, it was not until Apollo 12 that the Parker valve was added to the shut down sequence.
The Parker valve was used for helium pressurization of the RCS thrusters and had shown some issues in the earlier flights. By shutting off the Parker valve (the company that made them) helium pressure was removed from the thruster fuel tanks.
Walter Chronkite gave the world a verbal aside that cycle the Parker valve meant that the main engine had been shut down, and that confirmed that they were actually on the surface of the Moon.
Our copy of the August 1969 Parker Hannifin newsletter has gone missing (It'll show up, they never throw anything out!) but I've recently seen the December annual recap edition that references it in a story headlined - ready for it? - "Cycle the Parker Valve"...
"Parker can even be found out of this world. Every space shuttle lifts off with more than 1,000 Parker products on board. To boot, Parker was there for man's first moon landing. The historic space flight of the Apollo 11 relied on Parker valves, fittings and seals. Some of the first words from the lunar module were, "Cycle the Parker valve.""
Source:
Here
He built all the main fuel valves on all the shuttles, and the first 30 or so of the the other half of the valve that stays with the external tank on its plunge to earth...
A Mac Pro and 40-year-old tape drives are helping restore the original Lunar Orbiter tapes
PING!
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They may yet be rediscovered. Films lost or thought to be destroyed are sometimes, though rarely, found mislabeled or mis-stored or somehow recovered from a private archive.
Just shows how fragile modern technology is compared to some centuries-old tried-and-true methods.
I heard on the radio that now that Kodak Kodachrome is no longer produced, about 70 years worth of color photography will eventually be lost—because Kodachrome is impermanent. It fades over time.
Black-and-white photos, due to the processes it uses to develop and fix imagery, will be around for far longer.
...Or so I heard. A real photographer and archivist should step in!
Where is the Porta-Potty?
“Thank God the other valve he built was never used... “
Nukes?
No. The astronaut killer.
Y’all might be interested in this story and link considering your age and all...
This will not settle your debate, I’m sure, but here’s the text I have from the book _First on the Moon_, by Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, on page 8:
CAPCOM (DUKE): Thirty seconds.
ALDRIN [Static]: ...Forward. Drifting right...[static]...Contact light. Okay, engine stop. ACA out of detent.
ARMSTRONG: Got it.
ALDRIN: Mode controls, both auto, descent engine command override, off. Engine arm, off. 413 is in.
CAPCOM (DUKE): We copy you down, Eagle.
ARMSTRONG: Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
...And this bit from _Failure Is Not An Option_ by Gene Kranz, who was flight director during Apollo 11’s landing. Page 292:
“There is a lengthy pause in all crew communications, then, ‘Contact light...engine stop...ACA out of detent.’ It takes me a second to realize the crew is going through the engine shutdown checklist, just as they did in training. It really sinks in when Carlton, in a droll, almost bored voice says, ‘Flight, we’ve had a shutdown.’ Duke responds, ‘We copy you down, Eagle.’”
Okay, personally, I think people can be forgiven for not mentioning the “Cycle the Parker Valve” checklist item on the Apollo 11 landing if Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin, and Kranz skip over it in their own books.
Kodachrome has the best archival properties of any color film made in the last 75 years so long as they are stored in a dark, cool, dry place. There are 50+ year old photos on Kodachrome that look like they were taken yesterday. Because there are no dye couplers built into Kodachrome (they're added during processing), Kodak didn't have to make compromises on the dyes used to form the images. Other color films both negative and positive fade more even in ideal storage conditions.
If you want to save color images to archive them for posterity, scan them to TIFF files at high resolution. Another way to save color photos is to make color separation negatives onto fine grained panchromatic black and white film. The color information is then stored as metallic silver on 3 separate black and white photos and should be stable for centuries compared to the color dyes in color film that can last a few decades.
The US government does not give free advertising to mere private vendors.
“Cycle the Parker valve” has been edited out of every official record.
I think oldbill got tricked due to the simple fact that there were many valves made by Parker Hannifin on the LEM. The one I’m talking about was the main engine fuel/oxidizer valve. The one he referenced was a different valve that pressurized the tanks for the attitude control jets.
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: NASA FINDS MISSING MOON LANDING TAPES
Daily Express (UK) ^ | Sunday June 28 2009 | Ted Jeory
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2289466/posts?page=1
Posted on 7/9/2009 10:44:21 PM by Rodamala
What words were never transmitted from the surface of the Moon that should have been?
(Although there are no wrong answers, I have a specific answer in mind that would have been both historically appropriate, and would have insured a permanent manned space presence).
Sorry, no prize for getting it right...
Supposedly Armstrong said, "that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The recording has the word "a" omitted.
With a billion people watching, he muffed his line. I’m willing to give him a pass. In similar circumstances, I’m pretty sure I would have said “ga ga gah...” and pee’d my pants!
"Can't wait to begin work on the AWESOME Parker Permanent Lunar Station that we'll start building the moment Apollo 12 lands!!1!" ;-) :-D
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