Come to the Dark Side

iPhone 6s

ƒ/2.2

4.15 mm

1/30

I love these peculiar perspectives on the moon. 🌖

On the right, a slice of the moon, larger than anything brought back by Apollo (it really looks like that up close). On the left, the far side of the moon (misleadingly called the “dark side” just because we never see it from Earth), seen for the first time in high resolution from recovered Lunar Orbiter tape storage by Dennis Wingo in a pirate McDonalds at NASA Ames.

Before Apollo, the U.S. flew robotic satellites around the moon taking analog photos in strips. The film had to be developed onboard the satellite in the onboard dark room (since the satellite would not return to Earth). The film was then raster scanned with a 5 micron beam and transmitted back to Earth. A lot of work before digital cameras!

This image is an aggregate of many strips, each an orbital pass around the far side of the moon. But none of the original photos were released to the public. In every NASA press release, they showed a degraded photo of a photo. It was the Cold War period, and the U.S. did not want the Soviets to know how good our spy sat camera resolution really was.

We never see the far side of the Moon from Earth (given the tidal lock of our moon, the slightly heaviest side always faces Earth). So this image, degraded from this original, seen in the U.S. in the 60’s for the first time, was a detailed unveiling of the space frontier, of the unknown.

And we found a ginormous impact crater (far right side of the photo), which stands out as the dominant, and hidden, feature of our moon. Well, it occurred to me that a young George Lucas must have seen that image from 1967, inspiring the Death Star of his imagination. “That’s no moon!”

Details from Denis WIngo: “This image, Lunar Orbiter IV-188-M is a medium resolution image taken by the 80mm focal length camera on the fourth Boeing built Lunar Orbiter. This is the first of the five Lunar Orbiters to fly in a polar rather than a near equatorial orbit. After the success of the first three missions in mapping the near side equatorial region of the Moon to 1 meter resolution, NASA decided to use the fourth orbiter to map the entire Moon at moderate resolution. This image, the 188th medium resolution image of the series, was taken from an altitude of 2675 kilometers and has a resolution of 442 meters. The section of the Moon photographed combines part of the familiar near side region named Oceanus Procellarum or “Ocean of Storms”. Other major lunar features include Mare Orientale “Eastern Sea”, the crater Grimaldi (lower right, near the Ocean of Storms” and the crater Einstein, in the center of the image. To the leftward edge of the sunlit portion is the beginning of the lunar far side, not visible from the Earth.” (and I added the annotated photo to the comments below)

9 responses to “Come to the Dark Side”

m.p.moody

Jun 16, 2017 at 4:37 pm

Quite a photo lab on board, especially considering the year. When I worked at Nasa Ames in the Planetary Geology group as an intern for Santa Clara University in 1972 I collected every free publication I could find. One of these was the original MOONLAB study done by Stanford in 1968 that researched the location, design and other factors in building a base on the Moon. Here’s a copy of the cover: http://www.flickr.com/photos/15752486@N07/34957686420/in/datepos...

The authors: http://www.flickr.com/photos/15752486@N07/35215425131/in/datepos...

and the page that concludes the ideal location as crater Grimaldi primarily for the benefits of astronomical observation:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15752486@N07/35178005742/in/datepos...

Another publication I have saved (45 years) is another Stanford Study managed by John Billingham (who I met in 1972) titled Project Cyclops – the original study that evolved into SETI.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15752486@N07/35178005222/in/datepos...

Reply
jurvetson

Jun 16, 2017 at 5:28 pm

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. Choosing an equatorial location is interesting… as they would have to endure the long, cold lunar nights (something Apollo made a point to avoid by landing early in the day). We hosted a couple salons on low-cost lunar settlement, and focus on a polar location. Details And the Death Star look is striking on your brochure cover… inspiring manyDetails on that slice of the moon

Reply
jurvetson

Jun 16, 2017 at 6:25 pm

Oh, I just noticed an entire section of Lunar Orbiter photos will be in the forthcoming Sotheby’s auction catalog… and Dennis Wingo corrected the text in that catalog pre-print for an official description that he submitted to the planetary data system:
__________________________________________
The NASA Lunar Orbiter (LO) program was a series of five unmanned orbiter missions launched by the United States in 1966 through 1967 to study and map the lunar surface prior to the Apollo program landings. All five LO missions were successful, and 99% of the Moon was photographed with a resolution of 60m or better. The first three missions were focused on imaging 20 potential landing sites for Apollo astronauts. Lunar Orbiter 4 photographed the entire near side and 95% of the far side, and Lunar Orbiter 5 completed far-side coverage and acquired medium (20 m) and high (2 m) resolution images of 36 pre-selected areas.

Images obtained by the Lunar Orbiters were images acquired as a single photograph on 70mm film, one each for each camera instrument. Each LO exposure produced two photographs: medium-resolution frames (recorded by the wide-angle, 80 mm focal length lens) and high-resolution frames (recorded by the narrow-angle, 610-mm focal length lens). Both cameras were pointed so that the area imaged by the high-resolution lens was centered within the area imaged by the medium-resolution frames. The 70mm photographs obtained were processed on board the spacecraft utilizing a ‘Bimat’ process developed by Kodak. The resulting photographs were then scanned by a light beam derived from a rotating phosphor driven by an electron beam which was collimated into a 5 micron light source which then was passed through the film horizontal to the direction of travel of the film. This was repeated approximately 17,400 times, the light beam advancing five microns perpendicularly to the direction of travel of the film per scan. After completing this scan, the film was advanced by 0.1 inch, creating a 0.005 inch overlap to the previous scan. Fiducial marks were added during the scan process which provided a means to determine the exact spot of the overlap on each end of the scan. This is seen as a ‘stitching’ pattern of an individual scan near each edge. The fiducial marks provided a means for the original Lunar Orbiter imaging team to reassemble a complete photograph using optical means. This also allowed our team the ability to do the same electronically. The scanning light beam then scanned successive .11 inch strips until a complete photograph was scanned. The light that passed through the film illuminated a photomultiplier tube which then converted the light that shown through the film into electronic signals with an output voltage proportional to the density of the film. The individual scans across the vertical axis of the film are commonly termed ’framelets’ while the assemblage of framelets into an image were termed ‘frames’ The full LO dataset consists of more than 960 medium- and 980 high-resolution frames. The high-resolution frames are typically broken into three smaller sections or ‘sub-frames’, designated by H1, H2 and H3.

The Lunar Orbiter photographs were transmitted to Earth as analog data in real time during the scanning process. The data were written to magnetic tape and also to film. The magnetic tape record forms the basis of the LOIRP LO archive. The magnetic tape record preserves exactly the character of the missions in progress, including the audio loops between the different teams at the ground station and interactions between the ground stations and Lunar Orbiter mission control. The LOIRP LO archive was created by replicating the process used at the ground stations to record the tapes in reverse, that is playing the tapes in the same manner that the mission progressed. The film data were used to create hand-made mosaics of LO frames. Large-format prints (16 x 20 inches) from the mosaics were created and several copies were distributed across the U.S. to NASA image and data libraries. The magnetic tapes were delivered from the three DSN ground stations to NASA Langley. The tapes were originally recorded in ‘pre-demodulation’ format, meaning that the Lunar Orbiter 2.295 Ghz downlink was down converted to 10 MHz and then the undemodulated analog waveforms written directly to the tapes. These tapes were then demodulated and duplicated and sent to various NASA centers and the Bellcomm subcontractor. The magnetic tapes were used in conjunction with print images obtained from the Lunar Orbiter Ground Reconstruction Equipment (GRE) to choose the landing sites for Apollo 11, 12, and 14. The magnetic tapes were digitized in small samples called ‘chits’ in the chosen landing ellipses. These digitized chits were processed with possibly the world’s first digital image processing software on a UNIVAC 1170 to determine the size of rocks on the surface of the Moon as well as the slope angles of the terrain. The output of this software process was then compared to the requirements for the safe landing of the Apollo lunar landers for smoothness and levelness of the chosen terrain.

The output of the Lunar Orbiter GRE film, while providing outstanding views of generally very high spatial resolution and covered a substantial portion of the lunar surface, suffered from a "venetian blind" striping (in some publications noted as a ‘W’ pattern), missing or duplicated data, and frequent saturation effects that hampered their use. Nevertheless, for many years these images have been the basis of much of lunar scientific research. Because they were obtained at low to moderate Sun angles, the Lunar Orbiter photographic mosaics are particularly useful for studying the morphology of lunar topographic features. The LOIRP LO archive will extend this to provide a means for the scientific community to do comparisons between Lunar Orbiter photographs and newer missions such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s LROC NAC and WAC images at comparable resolutions and dynamic range. An additional limitation of the GRE film derived images, not generally considered until the advent of the LOIRP LO archive effort, is that the dynamic range (the scale from white to black on an image) was compressed from the original 1000 to 1 of the 70mm spacecraft film to a 250 to 1 range for the GRE film based products. The increased dynamic range of the LOIRP LO archive is best seen in a large reduction in the saturation effects seen in the GRE film products. The GRE film dynamic range compression was mostly at the ends of the white and dark film density scales and thus the improvements are most visible in high contrast images or images nearing an over or under exposure condition. Details not recognizable due to saturation in the GRE film product are clearly visible in the LOIRP LO archive image products.

Reply
m.p.moody

Jun 17, 2017 at 4:26 am

Ironically, another artifact I saved from my Nasa Ames days is a collection of presumably Lunar Orbiter photo strips (your thoughts?). Each of the 15 strips is 10" by 90" and provide an extraordinary panorama when layered in sequence:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15752486@N07/35224513171/in/datepos...

The collection was literally left for trash as I suspect it was printed in reverse by mistake – see here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15752486@N07/34544249243/in/datepos...

Reply
rocketmavericks

Jun 17, 2017 at 5:43 am

There is a lot more to the LOIRP (Lunar Orbital Imager Recovery Project that is worth learning about in the recent Carnegie Museum of Art documentary. These images were analog technology, and not digital tape, so they carry much higher resolution in the imaging recording than we get today with our best digital imagers or the digital technology at the time of the Apollo landing. Dennis’s team have rivaled the digital images from the recent LADEE mission digital imagers with their old analog redigitized tape. Old school does rule!!!

The challenge for the LOIRP team of Dennis and Keith Cowing was rebuilding the analog recording tape units and heads to re-read and sample and archive the recorded data. Dennis had a retired analog Ampex recording engineer who was a guru at repairing the old magnetic heads and keeping them working while they digitized the tapes.. You can not buy replacement heads and parts so it was really the ingenuity and brilliance of the team Dennis and Keith put together that brought back a whole set of images that had been given up and were to be destroyed by NASA .

Images here: http://www.moonviews.com/images/ …enjoy!!!

(Future generations owe Dennis and Keith and the whole LOIRP team a tremendous thanks for their selfless work going beyond their funding and support from NASA to save a true treasure of the Apollo program that very few know about.

More for those with interest and appetite for discovery. One of the main earth stations that received most of the Apollo broadcast imaging and video back to earth is located behind my home in the Cachagua Valley here near Carmel Valley Its worth a visit to really take a walk back into time but finding it and the drive back into the Santa Lucia Highlands is not for the casual driver.

Advice: Don’t depend upon Apple and Google Maps. They are broken.

Reply
m.p.moody

Jun 17, 2017 at 9:06 pm

Steve, will you be bidding on the Apollo 11 Moon Rock item? or no comment?

Reply
jurvetson

Jun 19, 2017 at 6:31 pm

If you mean the bag being sold by Sotheby’s, the estimated price is too rich for my interests.

Tom — thanks so much for the additional detail and backstory.

P.S. I just discovered this weekend that I now have spare antennae from the Lunar Orbiter program. Here is the High Gain Antenna

Reply
jurvetson

Jun 20, 2020 at 10:29 pm

I have a photo annotation for the original photo above from Dennis Wingo, who recovered the LOIRP images:

Reply
jurvetson

Jun 23, 2020 at 6:54 pm

Kodak camera unit with 70mm film spools: And a New Yorker carton from back in the day, referencing the banded images produced

Reply

Come to the Dark Side

9 responses to “Come to the Dark Side”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply