Moonviews

LOIRP Status Report 20 May 2013

2013-05-20T20:09:30Z

Dennis Wingo: Got the new refurbished head working today! Going back and doing one Madrid tape and then instead of doing the 18 scotch tapes we are going to start with the Goldstone tapes which some of them overlap the Scotch tapes. This also preserves the head in case something happens with the Scotch tapes so that we get our LOII stuff done as we promised for our Rockethub donors...

Maintaining Our Old Tape Drives

2013-05-17T04:30:47Z

Ken Zin works with an Ampex tape drive head for our FR-900 tape drive. This one had to be sent back to repair after the refurbishment. One of the head tips did not work.

How Life Magazine Revealed "Earthrise" in 1966

2013-05-05T19:56:38Z

The following two pages from the 9 September 1966 issue of Life magazine are how many people first saw the famous "earthrise" photo taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 less than two weeks earlier. The editors of Life sought to place the image in a context such that people could see what was actually in the picture. LOIRP has done similar analyses here and here. Due to the enhanced resolution of our images we were able to pin down the exact time and orientation of Earth a bit more accurately than was possible in 1966.

Click on images to enlarge.

LOIRP analysis in 2008

Boeing Planetary Probe Concept Based on Lunar Orbiter Design

2013-04-28T19:26:05Z

"This is an artist's impression of how an unmanned would look as it neared Mars before going into a the planet. The Boeing Company has proposed building such a spacecraft, using technology developed during the successful Lunar Orbiter program. It would carry automatic equipment for taking, developing and sending back to Earth close-up photos of our neighboring planets. The spacecraft would operate in orbit for about a year and could be used on missions to Mars or Venus." Larger image.

LOIRP Supporter Michael Wright Stops By McMoons

2013-04-24T19:35:22Z

Dennis Wingo: "Michael Wright came by and picked up his image this past week and we took a picture of him with our FR-900 machine. We thank Michael for his support! He also brought by some pictures of paintings by LOIRP benefactor Don Davis, of the iconic L5 habitat images from Gerry O'Neil's studies in the 70's. Many of us are Gerry's kids..."

LOIRP Supporter Certificates

2013-04-17T19:43:50Z

Dennis Wingo: "Today has been organization and logistics day for shipping stuff. We have all of the prints and their certificates done for the $1000, $750, and $500 prizes. We are missing some addresses and even names! I will email those folks tonight. The images below are your certificates. The gold rimmed certificates are for the $5000, and $1000 prizes and the rest get the certificates with the green border. Stuff will start being mailed tomorrow we promise...."

High Resolution Lunar Orbiter V Mosaic of Crater Copernicus

2013-04-14T21:04:50Z

This mosaic of the floor of crater Copernicus was created by combining the following 24 high resolution images taken by Lunar Orbiter V on 16 August 1967: 5148_H1, 5148_H2, 5148_H3, 5149_H1, 5149_H2, 5149_H3, 5150_H1, 5150_H2, 5150_H3, 5152_H1, 5152_H2, 5152_H3, 5153_H1, 5153_H2, 5153_H3, 5154_H1, 5154_H2, 5154_H3, 5155_H1, 5155_H2, 5155_H3, 5156_H1, 5156_H2, and 5156_H3.

One of the later Apollo missions was originally planned to land inside Copernicus crater. The last three Apollo missions were eventually canceled.

[Larger image] [Much larger image] [Very large image at NLSI] [ 10% size image exceptionally large]

[Full resolution, This image is 24 GIGABYTES. This is probably the largest image of planetary data ever put together into one mosaic. If it were blown up to full size at 300 DPI it would still be 37 feet wide by 18 feet tall.]

Lunar Orbiter Camera System Prior to Being Placed in Pressure Shell

2013-04-09T17:48:24Z

larger image

Lunar Orbiter Model at Apollo 11 Press Center in Houston

2013-04-05T23:52:58Z

A model of the Boeing-built Lunar Orbiter, which paved the way for the Apollo 11 mission with its close-up photos of the moon, looks down on a mockup of a lunar landscape at the press center in Houston. (Boeing photo). Larger Image.

Making the Lunar Orbiter Models

2013-04-03T03:20:02Z

Our friend Andrew Filo of Special Projects from Cupertino, CA has the Lunar Orbiter models almost done for those who donated for the models as your prize. Thanks very kindly and they will be sent out in about a week. We are starting to get everything together for fulfillment of the items that you got for your donations. Looking forward to getting everything to you!

What Do Star Trek and Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project Have in Common?

2013-03-15T21:52:50Z

We're especially happy that William Shatner had these nice words to say about us. You see, we at LOIRP and McMoons have a favorite Star Trek Episode: "City on the Edge of Forever". As you will recall Kirk, Spock and McCoy go back in time to the 1930s. At one point Spock has to hack his 23rd century tricorder with early 20th century electronics to get data off of it. In our case, we used early 21st century electronics to hack mid 20th century electronics to gain access to 45 year old data. Like Spock and Kirk, we had to do some dumpster diving to get parts. We like to make old things work to explore space. Check out our RocketHub page.

William Shatner Tweets His Support for Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project

2013-03-15T20:53:46Z

Keith Cowing

We Need Your Help To Complete the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project

2013-03-15T13:14:45Z

We are currently enaged in a crowdfunding campaign with RocketHub. Please take the time to visit our RocketHub page. We hope you will consider our project important enough to support.

Bloomberg TV Stops By at McMoons

2013-03-14T13:25:01Z

Some nice folks from Bloomberg TV stopped by McMoons today to shoot a story on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. We'll let you know when it is set to air.

Thanks To You We're Ordering a New Head

2013-03-04T15:55:32Z

Thanks so very much for your support. Though we are well short of our goal at this time, we have raised enough money to do the most essential thing that we have to do, which is to order the refurbishment of one head. Tony Korte of www.videomagnetics.com and his great staff of people are a critical part of our overall team. Without Tony there would be no more heads for our FR-900 machine and they have worked with us over the past few years to keep our machines going.

The first tranche of money raised is going to go to Tony to refurbish one head. We need more to finish the project but this will give us our first leg up in moving forward. My latest picture shows the head that your generosity has funded to get refurbished. There is an incredibly delicate and technical art to head refurbishment and the FR-900 is the most technically challenging head refurbish that they do for the old Ampex machines. This is because the FR-900 is not simply a video recorder, it is an instrumentation recorder with higher bandwidth than the commercial video machines. This means that the tolerances are tighter and the accuracy of head alignment must be better than on the video machines. This obviously costs more money.

With your help we can get more of these heads refurbished and pay our people to be able to transfer these images!

Dennis