REAL LIFE NEWS: MOON IMAGES FROM FIFTY YEARS AGO ARE OF SURPRISING QUALITY
by Hazed
At the start of the space race fifty years ago, when the Apollo missions were being planned, five unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon. Their job was to take pictures of the surface, so mission control back home could pick the best landing site.
The images were extremely high resolution and could be blown up to 40 x 54 size, so the exact spots where the astronauts would walk could be identified.
Then these super-hi-res images were locked away until after the bulk of the moon landings, because the USA didn’t want to give away details of its secret spy satellite cameras, the technology of which was used in the orbiters.
In 1971, low-res images from the cameras were released. But they were grainy and of poor quality, and were mostly of interest to academics.
The data that the lunar orbiters sent back to Earth was stored on analogue tapes. These were moved around for many years, until finally some forward-thinking scientists decided they had to be digitised for future generations, before the tapes decayed or the technology needed to read them was no longer available.
Getting the pictures off the tapes was quite a challenge, and how they did it is detailed at the first link below.
The recovery project has now brought back 2,000 images from 1,500 tapes and they are of surprising quality. The second link below has the pictures recovered between 2007 and 2014. Warning: the files are very large!
Source: http://www.worldofindie.co.uk/?p=682
http://www.moonviews.com/
