OJ did it
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"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.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."
Is that al gore bit true ?
If they find it, maybe we will actually hear Armstrong say, "Good luck Mr. Gorski!"
Capricorn 1
The amount of records that NASA keeps has got to be incredible. Since the invention of the camera and motion picture technology, mankind has gotten to where we record everything. However, we record it in the most impermanent methods imaginable. Add to that, we don't seem to have any idea what's important, anymore. Even something as incredible as the moon landing becomes mundane to the people working space travel every day. I hope they find it.
OJ did it
Roswell incident - July 8, 1947
Ask Greaseball Richardson to look behind the Xerox machine at Los Alamos!
While making a digitalized copy may be wise to insure against complete loss of the origina l, in the past we've seen far too great a reliance on the digital copy, with a tendency then to neglect the analog original. Don't let that happen!
As time goes on, we're gradually able to extract more and more improved images from old magenetic tape. Such later extractions are often far better than earlier extractions. If we discard or neglect the original, or equipment to read it, we can have a bad case of buyer's remorse.
Preserve your analog assets!
HF
Next, we're going to hear Area 51 has misplaced the alien bodies from the Roswell crash.
Neil Armstrong born - 08/05/1930
Can't they just go back to the movie studio where the moon landing was REALLY filmed, and take some more pictures? (sarcasm off.)
Where's Mulder and Scully when ya need 'em?
This isn't the first time they've lost something important.
I read a while back that they can't seem to find the blueprints for the Saturn V rocket.
Nobody thought to make backups?
I was *just* gonna post that!! < |:)~
But what is the gestation period of a Roswell alien? If it, too, is nine months, then I think you're onto something!
Coasttocoastam...Art Bell's show did this story last week. The host was George Noorey and the guest was Richard C. Hoagland.
Mr. Hoagland thinks the tapes were deliberately destroyed because they show buildings and other stuff on the moon that the goobermint doesn't want us to see.
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