Apollo 11 missing tapes
As the real-time broadcast worked and was widely recorded, preservation of the backup video was not deemed a priority in the years immediately following the mission.
The search was sparked when several still photographs appeared in the late 1990s that showed the visually superior raw SSTV transmission on ground-station monitors.
The researchers concluded that the tapes containing the raw unprocessed Apollo 11 SSTV signal were erased and reused by NASA in the early 1980s, following standard procedure at the time.
[1][3][4] Although the researchers never found the telemetry tapes, they did discover the best visual quality NTSC videotapes as well as Super 8 movie film taken of a video monitor in Australia, showing the SSTV transmission before it was converted.
[8] When the Apollo TV camera radioed its images, the ground stations received its raw unconverted SSTV signal and split it into two branches.
[10] The conversion process started when the signal was sent to a high-quality 10-inch (25 cm) video monitor, where a conventional RCA TK-22 television camera—using the NTSC broadcast standard of 525 scanned lines interlaced at 30 fps—merely re-photographed its screen.
Image degradation was unavoidable with this system as the monitor and camera's optical limitations significantly lowered the original SSTV signal's contrast, brightness and resolution.
[12] When Armstrong first came down the Lunar Module's ladder, he was barely visible because the contrast and the vertical phase were not set correctly by the scan converter operator.
If the one-inch (25 mm) data tapes, containing the raw unprocessed Apollo 11 SSTV signals, were to be found, modern digital technology would allow for significantly better conversion and processing.
[18] News that these analog data tapes were missing emerged on August 5, 2006, when the print and online versions of The Sydney Morning Herald published a story with the title One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures.
[1] On November 1, 2006, Cosmos magazine reported that some NASA telemetry tapes from the Apollo project era had been found in a small marine science laboratory in the main physics building at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.
[25] NASA held a news conference at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C. regarding the missing tapes on July 16, 2009—the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's launch from Cape Kennedy.
Since the real-time broadcast conversion worked, and was widely recorded on both videotape and film, the backup video was not deemed important at the time.
[1] There was also documentation that the Apollo 11 moonwalk SSTV was recorded at the Parkes, Australia facility on modified Ampex two-inch helical scan VTRs.
[1][26] The VTRs were modified by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Labs to record 320-line slow-scan video directly to the videotape without converting it.
[3] Mike Inchalik, president of Lowry Digital, mentioned that his company would only restore the video and would not remove defects (such as reflections that looked like flag poles).
[citation needed] Some other footage from Australian ground-station feeds showing SSTV video of Armstrong's descent and first steps surfaced through John Sarkissian's efforts.
[28] Highlights of this fully enhanced video were shown to the public for the first time at the Australian Geographic Society Awards on October 6, 2010, where Buzz Aldrin was the guest of honor.
