Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
[3] The rest of the Lunar Orbiter images have been successfully recovered[2] and have been published in NASA's Planetary Data System.
[4] The images taken by the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were primarily used to locate landing sites for the crewed Apollo missions.
Over time, Evans' team also collected documentation and spare parts for the tape drives from various government surplus sources.
The project was successful at getting the raw analog data from the tapes, but in order to generate the images, they discovered that they needed the specialized demodulation hardware that had been used by the Lunar Orbiter program but no longer existed.
In its archives, he happened to come across a memo from 1996 containing a proposal by Mark Nelson to digitize the Lunar Orbiter images, as described above.
Dennis Wingo is president of the aerospace engineering company SkyCorp and a long-time worker in space and computing technologies.
They were stored with a pallet of manuals and schematics for the tape drives, along with hard copies of data related to the lunar images.
[12] Wingo and Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and president of SpaceRef Interactive, respectively, now served as co-leaders of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP).
Since the team required a facility with proper heating and cooling, and a sink, available vacant buildings outside the gate of Ames Research Center were whittled down to two: a barber shop, and a McDonald's restaurant that had closed weeks before.
Wingo and Cowing quickly found more expertise in Ken Zin, a U.S. Army veteran who had long experience in working with analog tape machines, including the FR-900 series.
With the assistance of Ken Davidian at NASA Headquarters, funding was found in 2008 for a pilot project to show that the drives could be repaired, and that images could be recovered from the original tapes.
He began sending out an email newsletter, one that was later converted to a blog, MoonViews.com, and posting photos to the project's Facebook page.
Student interns from the nearby San Jose State University were recruited, and the team requested help from retired and current employees of Ampex and from blog writers with audiences that might be able to help.
The project was reported in the Los Angeles Times,[5] Computerworld,[13] National Geographic,[14] the Associated Press,[15] American Libraries,[16] the local news,[17] and numerous blogs.
[18][19][20] Included in every news story was the message that the images are a vital piece of history, but more than this, that they contain scientific data of a time, place, and quality that has not been repeated.
The data from the Lunar Orbiter tapes is then run through a demodulator, and through an analog-to-digital converter so that it can be fed into a computer for digital processing.
[25][26] After another month of repairing and replacing parts, testing and tuning mechanisms, the project got the first solid result that the tapes were good.
The search for documentation has been extensive and usually disappointing, as it often turns out that retired or elderly engineers have just recently cleaned out their garages.
Posting to a blog, Dennis Wingo said, "I cannot tell you how many times we have heard similar stories of recently tossed manuals over the last six months".
At the same time, they discovered a tape, which, from the audio clip at the start, sounded as if it contained a demodulated recording of one of the images.
If the team could rescue this image, the project would prove "that the drive can be refurbished to the point of reliably playing a tape back".
[27] Work continued, and the team coined the term "technoarchaeology" to describe the process of researching which tape contained what image.
With these results, more funds were released—another $150,000 to complete a major restoration of the drives and to create the demodulation hardware needed for the other tapes.
[citation needed] On March 21, 2009, the team announced that they had rescued an un-demodulated image from one of the tapes, using the newly perfected demodulation system.
NASA Scientist Martin Swetnick was quoted in a Time magazine article from 1966, calling this image "one of the great pictures of the century".
[17] A couple of months later an article in Computerworld revealed that the project had a new grant of $600,000, and had hopes to completely digitize all the images by February 2010.
The LOIRP Online Data Volumes were published for public access by NASA at the PDS Cartography and Imaging Sciences Node on January 31, 2018.
