Posted on 08/05/2006 7:34:12 AM PDT by oxcart
THE heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.
But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.
A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.
It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.
Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We are working on the assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told the Herald.
"Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."
Mr Sarkissian began researching the role of Parkes in Apollo 11's mission in 1997, before the movie The Dish was made. However, when he later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the tapes, they could not be found.
"People may have thought 'we have tapes of the moon walk, we don't need these'," said the scientist who hopes a new, intensive hunt will locate them.
If they can be found, he proposes making digitalised copies to treat the world to a very different view of history.
But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.
"We want the public to see it the way the moon walk was meant to be seen," Mr Sarkissian said.
"There will only ever be one first moon walk."
Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.
"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.
Many people involved had retired or died.
Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings. The format used by the original pictures beamed from the moon was not compatible with commercial technology used by television networks. So the images received at Parkes, and at tracking stations near Canberra and in California, were played on screens mounted in front of conventional television cameras.
"The quality of what you saw on TV at home was substantially degraded" in the process, Mr Sarkissian said, creating the ghostly images of Armstrong and Aldrin that strained the eyes of hundreds of millions of people watching around the world.
Even Polaroid photographs of the screen that showed the original images received by Parkes are significantly sharper than what the public saw. While the technique looks primitive today, Mr Sarkissian said it was the best solution that 1969 technology offered.
Among the few who saw the original high-quality broadcast was David Cooke, a Parkes control room engineer in 1969.
"I can still see the screen," Mr Cook, 74, said. "I was amazed, the quality was fairly good."
Good luck keeping a 50 year old B&W 2" Quad machine running for the next 20 years. Even if you do, good luck keeping a 70 year old magnetic tape from shedding all of it's oxide as you attempt to play it back.
Nowadays, you can extract the information from an LP using nothing but a laser, so it may be possible in the future to have an equally non-contact method of recovering the magnetic information pattern from tape, then process it digitally. But keeping the original machines to read the stuff is not feasable.
I think the likely explanation for that is that RFK took custody of his brother's brain from the National Archives, and either buried it or cremated it himself. Bobby was afraid that JFK's brain would go on display some day for future generations, and he didn't want that to happen.
It is. We're talking literally millions of tapes. Stuff like the Apollo tapes is back in a corner someplace, lying there unaccessed for years.
Reminds me of the last scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
HF
I agree absolutely. Don't junk the meduim just because you can't read it today. If it has historical significance, at some point a new method of reading it will be created.
He's back as taxesareforever. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1683209/posts?page=134#134
LOL!! I was going right there when I clicked this thread!
Just last week I was chatting with my 9 year old daughter in the car and a big full moon was before us down the highway.
I started talking about how when I was her age, the last mission to the moon had been completed.
She was in disbelief! "You mean people walked on the moon?"
All of a sudden, the time warp vortex toke hold of me and I could barely stay on the road after realizing what an old codger I had become!
In the early 70's, I was a kid and even though I saw stuff on the news about Vietnam, I was much more interested in space travel! Landing on the moon was a thrill and still a big topic of discussion at the time. As a young boy I had military toys and space toys. To me, dreaming about landing on the moon is like I just did it yesterday!
So I started to explain how it started, how the tiny capsules would be used, and of course, Armstrong's famous line.
I have since showed her some books I managed to keep from the 70's that explained the complicated maneuvers in space that had to happen. I haven't watched Apollo 13 with her yet but will soon.
It's hard to believe that the space program is barely even spoken about in school. I'm sad that of the many things from my childhood we've discussed, that this was the first time talking about space travel.
LOL!
I got to this thread by googling Harry Callahan to make sure I had the correct reference.
Worst loss since we lost the "A" in Armstrong's first step speech: "That's one small step for [a] man....."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.