Posted on 07/09/2009 5:32:33 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative
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.
If you want on or off this aerospace ping list, please contact Paleo Conservative or phantomworker by Freep mail.
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
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