At the Berkeley Innovation Forum today hosted by SETI, I received a very cool gift from NASA — one of the original 70mm tapes from the Lunar Orbiter program, recently recovered and enhanced to reveal detail as never seen before.
The NASA representative said they could not think of a better home for it than our space collection at work. We even have a conference room dedicated to the Lunar Orbiter — with a spare solar panel, Agena rocket engine, and the low-gain and high-gain antennas from the spacecraft, as well as high-res panorama photos of the moon captured by this orbiting film lab.
The spacecraft did not ship this film back to Earth. Instead, they developed the film inside the Lunar Orbiter and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/millimeter resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using yet-to-be-patented-by-others lossless analog compression. Three ground stations on Earth recorded the transmissions on these magnetic tapes. This short video animation shows its operation.
We had the first grainy picture in comments below behind us during the ceremony — the first view of Earth from the Moon, as seen by the public in 1966, and compared to today, an enhanced image from a return to the source material. That recovery effort by Dennis Wingo was herculean, as I discovered in 2008 when I stumbled upon his operations in an abandoned McDonalds at NASA Ames flying a pirate flag (I took the last photo at the time. The photos I shared of the project sparked a bunch of conspiracy theories about the lost or hidden NASA tapes: here on flickr Now I have one!
These Lunar Orbiter tapes were recorded 40 years ago to map the lunar surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward. They have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified as they reveal the extreme precision of our spy satellites. Instead, all we had ever seen were grainy photo-of-a-photo images that were released to the public.
Some of the applications of this project, beyond accessing some of the best images of the moon ever taken, are to scout for new landing sites and to find new craters on the moon today compared to 60 years ago, a measure of meteorite flux and risk to future lunar operations.
Back to that first grainy photo; just this week, The Times of India reflected on it as having "completely transformed how humanity saw itself. Writers, scientists, and philosophers have reflected on how it altered humanity’s sense of place in the cosmos. For the first time in history, humanity saw Earth not as the as the centre of the universe, but as a small, fragile sphere adrift in infinite darkness. Decades later, the photo was digitally restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, but even in its raw form, it remains a cosmic postcard, a reminder of just how precious and united our planet really is."
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