In 1967, the Lunar Orbiter missions sent back exciting – but grainy and low-rez – photos of the moon’s surface.
But it turns out that the Orbiters’ photos were actually super-high-rez,
shot on 70mm film and robotically developed inside the orbiters, with
the negs raster-scanned at 200 lines/mm and transmitted to ground
stations using an undisclosed lossless analog image-compression
technology. These were stored on tapes read by fridge-sized $300,000
Ampex FR-900 drives. These images were printed out at 40’ x 54’ so the Apollo astronauts could stroll over them and look for a landing spot.
But these images were not revealed to the public because NASA feared
that doing so would also reveal the US’s spy satellite capabilities.
Instead, NASA deliberately downrezzed and fuzzed the images that the
public got to see.
Ryan Smith tells the amazing story of the preservationists who rescued
the images off of disintegrating FR-900 magnetic tapes starting in 2007,
under JPL’s Nancy Evans, who set up her team in an abandoned McDonald’s
building and dubbed the project “McMoon.”
The McMoon team refurbished salvaged FR-900 drives, homebrewed a
digitizer system, and painstaking recovered the 2GB/image files that the
system generated. Evans’s team has recovered 2,000 images from 1,500
tapes, all in the public domain and available for download on Moonviews.com.
