MoonViews - Providing Imagery and Data For Lunar Exploration

Video: Two FR-900 Drives Operational

2009-11-12T20:56:05Z

The LOIRP Project has reached a major milestone of having two Ampex FR-900 Instrumentation Tape Drives operational at once. This will allow us to accelerate the production of images. This is probably the first time in 30 years that two FR-900s have been operational in the same room at the same time.

LOIRP Works To Bring Second FR-900 Tape Drive Online

2009-11-12T18:28:44Z

Keith's note: we are working to get our second FR-900 tape drive restored and operational. Once that is accomplished the LOIRP will embark upon a new program with a dramatically enhanced capability to retrieve - and release images.

Image: This is one of our original FR-900 Ampex heads with two new preamps. Part of our upgrade program - a Silicon Transistor Preamp and Germanium Preamp

Image: Here is our revised lab setup for the LOIRP project. We had to separate the two FR-900's due to their high thermal dissipation (about a kilowatt each). in the left foreground where Travis Harper, one of our students is working, we will be putting together the second Apple workstation for processing the image files as they are captured.

Image: We are making video on the second FR-900 this morning! This is a major milestone in the LOIRP project as it will allow us, as soon as the second demodulator is done, to increase the pace of image capture from the Lunar Orbiter Tapes

Image: Ken Zin is standing in front of FR-900 Unit 2. It is getting closer and closer to full operational status.

Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (Presentation at HackerDojo

2009-10-31T21:52:35Z

Dennis Wingo from the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) will be teaching a class at HackerDojo in 4 November 2009. HackerDojo is located at 140 South Whisman Road in Mountain View, CA (Map) from 6 to 7:30 pm. We hope to stream this presentation live.

LOIRP Presentation at NASA GSFC

2009-10-06T04:50:03Z

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Lunar Orbiter Featured in MIT's Technology Review Magazine

2009-09-28T16:53:01Z

Surface Restoration - Engineers restore high-resolution photos of the Moon, Technology Review (paid subscribers only) "The images of the Moon's surface taken by five NASA Lunar Orbiter satellites in 1966 and 1967 are still among the most detailed ever made. The original analog data, beamed down to Earth to plan landing sites for the Apollo missions, was recorded on magentic tapes that collected dust for decades and were nearly discarded. Now a team of engineers at an abandoned McDonald's at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, CA is processing the data using restored and custom-built equipment, enabling a public that saw only snapshopts of these historic images to view them at their full resolution for the first time."

Lunar Orbiter's Kodak Camera Profiled

2009-09-20T20:36:42Z

The Kodak Lunar Orbiter Camera, American Society of Cinematographers Blog "The recent media attention given to the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, with its dramatic restored video of Neil Armstrong’s first steps onto the lunar surface, has re-ignited our nation’s interest in extra-terrestrial exploration. But this mission would not have been possible had it not been for a series of lunar surface mapping missions that were made several years before. It is a story that is not as dramatic as that of the first humans to walk on the moon. But it is a fascinating story, nonetheless, of the way that the entire Apollo program pushed beyond the then perceived limits of technology. And the Eastman Kodak Company was a major player." "The recent AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) symposium held at the Dunn Theater of the AMPAS Pickford Center in Hollywood featured jaw-dropping presentations by Al Sturm and Ralph Sargent of the history of this program as well as the forensic-like work to find and restore its lost images. It is this latter theme I will take up soon along with the recent new photos also taken by a high resolution Kodak digital camera."

LOIRP Releases Recovered Lunar Orbiter III Image of Surveyor 1 On the Lunar Surface

2009-09-11T02:25:07Z

This image was taken by Lunar Orbiter III on 22 February 1967 at 5:24:14 GMT at an altitude of 54.27 km above the lunar surface. High resolution frame 3 clearly shows the Surveyor 1 spacecraft sitting on the lunar surface complete with a long shadow. Surveyor 1 landed on the Moon on 2 June 1966 in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) at 2.45 degrees South latitude, 43.22 degrees West longitude.

Larger view This image has been recovered in its original high resolution format by LOIRP staff from original Lunar Orbiter project data tapes using restored tape drive hardware and will eventually be submitted to the PDS (Planetary Data System). A full resolution version of this image will be placed online at the NASA Lunar Science Institute. The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) is located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. Funding and support for this project has been provided by NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA Innovative Partnerships Program, NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, Odyssey Moon LLC, SkyCorp Inc., and SpaceRef Interactive Inc. For more information on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) visit http://www.moonviews.com For information on NASA's Lunar Science Institute visit http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/ For information on NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate visit http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/

Another Example of 40 Year Old Data With Modern Relevance

2009-08-22T03:37:41Z

40-year-old data tackles very modern physics problem, Ars Technica "The Large Hadron Collider is still going through a painful commissioning process--coming online in time for the winter shutdown is probably not what researchers had in mind when they broke it the first time. So, what is a physicist to do when the shiny toys are still being polished? Sit around at the pub and gossip about old experiments, of course. One such session has ended with Jorg Jaeckel, from Durham University, taking a new look at 40-year-old data from a classical electrostatics experiment. He found that this data provided the strongest constraints on a particular set of particles so far, thus proving that some experiments age very gracefully indeed."

LOIRP and LRO Confirm That Humans Walked on the Moon

2009-08-21T01:57:31Z

Yesterday the LRO team released a new image of the Apollo 14 landing site. You can clearly make out the paths that the crew walked as well as the location of the Apollo 14 Antares Lunar Module Descent Stage. In June 2009 LOIRP issued its own view and analysis of this landing site - as seen by Lunar Orbiter III back in 1967. Comparing our high resolution image of the site with that taken by LRO clearly shows no feature where Antares' Descent Stage now stands [larger image]. While the resolution of the Lunar Orbiter image (0.8 meters/pixel) would probably not reveal astronaut tracks in great detail, we're rather certain that it would have seen an object the size of Antares' Descent Stage. As such, we're pretty certain that the Apollo 14 mission landed on the Moon!

Technoarchaeology: Finding The Right Image in a Room Full of Tapes

2009-08-20T02:49:27Z

Image: a portion of our set of Lunar Orbiter data tapes at McMoon's - an abandoned McDonalds onsite at NASA Ames Research Park, home of the LOIRP - Lunar Orbiter Image recovery Project. Here at the LOIRP (Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Process) project there are two different phases of the image retrieval process that are distinct from each other. The second phase, the production of the vast majority of all the of the Lunar Orbiter images, will simply involve putting tapes on the tape drive machines, acquiring the data, and processing them into images. However, we're still in the first phase of the project where we need to search through tapes in a painstaking fashion just to find the images we are interested in downloading. Once we find what we are looking for, downloading is a snap and can be done in a matter of hours. Finding the images using a jumbled nomenclature and labeling system last used more than 40 years ago is part of what we call "Technoarchaeology". There is a critical piece of information that we have never been able to find in all of our searches of the tapes: something that shows the linkage between the numbers on the tape cans. Each can has a label and number plus a letter designating the Earth ground station where they were recorded as the were sent back to Earth from a Lunar Orbiter spacecraft: W for Woomera, M for Madrid, and G for Goldstone. There is also an audio track on each tape where the tape drive operator often adds in operational notes such as date, time, etc. Indeed, you can often tell by the accent of the operator where the tape was recorded. Listen to this audio track and you can easily tell where it was recorded. The images themselves have been identified in all of the existing databases (e.g. LPI, USGS) using a nomenclature that actually makes sense. In the case of the lunar south pole image we released today LOIV-94-H1 for example means Lunar Orbiter 4, Image 94, High resolution, subframe 1 of 3). So, while we know which image is which, correlating that to which tape(s) that image is on is another matter all together. Therefore, what we have to do in our process of locating an image is to slowly look for the right images on the right tapes. This is quite labor intensive. In the case of LOIV-94-H1, we first went through several tapes we thought that it would be on, including the subframes (including the subframes equals a total of 3,480 images) and recorded the first and the last framelet number (each framelet has an identifying number). Since each framelet has a number, this allows us to capture a couple of framelets and then look for the right image in the LPI database. The problem with this approach is that the numbering system for the numbers on the framelets goes from 001-999. Since each high resolution image has about 28 framelet numbers (some framelets have two numbers due to the way that the calibration strips were written to the film), and each high resolution image has about 88 framelet numbers.

Image: This is another 2 inch tape reel on which the recently released Lunar Orbiter V image of the Earth was stored. Note on the label [much larger image] that "L.O.E." refers to "Lunar Orbiter E" aka "Lunar Orbiter V". The tape was recorded on day 238 of 1967 local time i.e. 26 August 1967. Starting at 06:34:38 GMT and ending at 07:26:10 GMT On the spacecraft, the high resolution and medium resolution images were taken at the same time. This means that theoretically, we have 88+28 or 116 plus a few blank framelets, per image. About every 8 images the numbers repeat!! This is why we had to copy every beginning and ending framelet number from each image into an Excel spreadsheet in order to do our matching of the images on the tapes with the LPI database numbering system. On top of this, we had three ground stations recording images (Woomera, Madrid, and Goldstone). We quickly discovered that we have more data tapes than what we should have for the number of images that NASA's documentation says that we should have. Another factor is that with three ground stations, the way that the images were obtained should have been systematic. But the process was not systematic as far as we can tell - and the tape labeling suggests. Think of it this way. The Moon is over any one location on the Earth for 13 hours. The original process of loading a tape on the tape drive and doing the downlink of an image took approximately an hour per image. As such, each ground station should be able to get 13 images per pass, right? No. One-third of the time, the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft is behind the Moon and therefore cannot send a signal. As such, two-thirds of 13 hours is about 8.5 hours of viewing time per pass per ground station. This is interrupted periodically by the spacecraft going behind the Moon. In theory this means that they should be able to get at least 8 high and medium resolution image pairs per pass over a given ground station on Earth. Each high and medium resolution image pair takes 43 minutes to receive (plus overhead time to load the tape, set things up, and then remove the tape), which means that they should be able to get one complete high resolution and medium resolution image per lunar near side pass (smart fellows they were to figure this out). However, this is not always the case.

Austin Epps sitting in the LOIRP lab at "McMoons" at NASA Ames Research Center downloading imagery from an original Lunar Orbiter data tape using a restored FR-900 tape drive on 18 August 2009. Some of the tapes that we have found only have a couple of minutes of video on them. One tape that we found had the same framelet repeated for the entire tape (the advance mechanism stuck on that image). Other tapes have partial images - and this is what we found with this most recent image LOIV-94-H1. The first part of LOIV-94-H1, which was not the subframe that we needed, was on a tape from Woomera (W-30). The second part of the image was on a Goldstone tape (G-38). Hmm... what is wrong with this picture? Well, if the image was just cut off because of the end of a lunar pass over the site, the next station that received the image should have been Madrid!! (the Moon sets in the west and from Australia that means Madrid was the next station. As such, we lost almost an entire day looking for a the rest of image LOIV-94-H1 . We are rather certain that as we go through the corpus of tapes that we will probably find some images - or fragments thereof - that are not in the established Lunar Orbiter datasets. These may well be images that no one has ever seen. How many there may be or what they are of will only be clear as we begin phase two of our project. We are really looking forward to the time where we can just put tapes on the tape drive and let it go and worry about what image number it is after the download has been completed. Right now, however, this hunt and seek process we use is what our daily life is like here at McMoon's. However, when we have both tape drives running and some new computers and software in place (soon), our output will dramatically increase. So, this was what our day was like today, August 19, 2009, as we were looking for images from the Lunar Orbiter program - the first of which were received on Earth exactly 43 years ago - almost to the day.

LOIRP Releases Restored Lunar Orbiter IV Image of the Lunar South Pole

2009-08-20T00:08:01Z

This image of the Moon's south pole was taken by Lunar Orbiter IV on 16 May 1967 at 16:00:08 GMT. This image is identified as Frame 4094,high resolution subframe h1. Large craters visible in this image include Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott. A larger web version of this image is online here. A full, high resolution version of this image is online here at the NLSI.

Video: Pulling Lunar Orbiter Images Off of Original Data Tapes

2009-08-19T14:27:13Z

Austin Epps sitting in the LOIRP lab at "McMoons" at NASA Ames Research Center downloading imagery from an original Lunar Orbiter data tape using a restored FR-900 tape drive on 18 August 2009

Austin Epps, LOIRP Student Employee

2009-08-19T04:14:01Z

Austin Epps, our ever vigilant (and creative) student LOIRP employee, sitting admist our all-Mac operation, downloading 40 year old Lunar Orbiter images. Click on image to enlarge.

Correcting Our South Pole Selenography

2009-08-19T03:18:55Z

"I have been involved in the illumination analysis of the lunar south pole for a while and your reference image (http://images.spaceref.com/news/2009/LO-IV-179-H1.label.jpg) seemed incorrect based on going over such images so many times. I checked it against Clementine imagery and it turns out that the labels you have are in the wrong places. I have attached a jpeg of the correct placements for the South Pole and Shackleton." - James Fincannon, NASA GRC

LOIRP Releases Restored Image of Lunar South Pole

2009-08-14T02:12:57Z

This image, LO-IV-179-H1, taken by Lunar Orbiter IV on May 24, 1967 at 16:19:23.809 GMT, shows a portion of the lunar south polar region. A much larger version [1.8 MB JPG] can be downloaded here. You can download the full resolution image [692 MB tiff] here at NLSI. The altitude of the spacecraft when this image was taken was 3,591.83 kilometers. The resolution of the image is 78.432 meters per pixel. Spacecraft Position: Altitude: 3591.83 km, Latitude: -71.38°, Longitude: -96.22° Principal Point: Latitude: -69.52°, Longitude: -74.07° Illumination: Sun Azimuth: 68.15°, Incident Angle: 82.85°, Emission Angle: 11.24°, Phase Angle: 94.08°, Alpha: -11.23°

In addition to the Moon's south pole (shaded), craters visible in this image include Drygalski, Cabeus (with its two satellite craters Cabeus A and Cabeus B), Malapert, Haworth, and Shoemaker.

This figure shows the region where this image was shot [red highlight]. Three high resolution frames were shot with this image covering the region over the south pole. [Larger image]

USGS map of the south pole showing the region covered in this Lunar Orbiter photo.

This collection of images of the lunar south pole shows the names of prominent features. Larger view.