July 20, 2018
Website Notice
Note: This website (moonviews.com) has not been regularly updated since 2014. Now that the project’s data has been submitted to NASA, this website will no longer be updated but will be maintained as an online archive of the LOIRP’s prior activities. Thank you for your interest in – and support of – our project. //
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) is a project to digitize the original analog data tapes from the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that were sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967; it is funded by NASA, SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and private individuals.[1]
The first image to be successfully recovered by the project was released in November 2008. It was the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon, taken in August 1966. On February 20, 2014, the project announced it had completed the primary tape capture portion of the project.[2] One medium resolution image, most of one high resolution image and parts of three others are missing, apparently due to lapses at the time they were being recorded.[3] The rest of the Lunar Orbiter images have been successfully recovered[2] and have been published in NASA's Planetary Data System.
“I’ve spent the past week in Mountain View, California, hanging out with a group of Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) hackers who are working out of an abandoned McDonald’s on the NASA Ames base. For more than five years, LOIRP technologists (or techno-archeologists, as they prefer to be called) have been reverse-engineering analog tape drives and developing new software in an attempt to unearth some of the first images of the moon that were taken by unmanned lunar orbiters in advance of the manned Apollo missions of the late 1960s. Upon entering the building (affectionately called “McMoon’s” by those who work within it) for the first time, I was greeted by familiar architecture. The drive-thru windows, menu light boxes, stainless steel counters, fiber glass tables and the ghosts of corporate brand ephemera all remain. However now they coexist under a jolly roger with a literal mountain of vintage 2-inch tape reels that contain trapped data, refrigerator-sized Ampex tape drives, an army of Mac workstations and a seemingly endless supply of analog tape decks, monitors, cables and soldering supplies.”
“Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia?”
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project is featured starting at 17:15. This segment was filmed in early 2014.
Vigilant migration of data as new storage techniques become available is the only way to assure long-term preservation. Even if the IRIG tapes are found, we are almost at the point where the tapes would be un-decipherable. I think one of my machines could play them (I say think as I’ve never tested it to full 500 kHz bandwidth), but I don’t have the specialized video decoder. NASA apparently preserved some equipment should the tapes ever show up.
This also raises another spectre. We MUST be selective as to what we keep in our archives because if we keep everything we won’t be able to afford it–or find it. This is one of the key jobs that archivists do. However, blindly following retention practices, as was done by NASA for the IRIG Apollo 11 tapes, needs to be tempered by historians as well. Certain small subsets of data (moonwalk slow scan video) are much more important than others (astronauts’ blood pressure and other biometrics throughout the entire flight).
All organizations who keep archives need to address this. In a generation (or less) if we save everything, it will become an overwhelming burden and the high points will be lost if they are not properly indexed.
(free) 333-page technical document on sound restoration titled "Manual of Analog Sound Restoration Techniques." It's written by Peter Copeland of The National Sound Archive in England (part of the British Library Board), and it's a remarkable and interesting document.
I don't agree with everything Copeland says, but he makes a number of good points in his report, and there's a lot of very good information in it, particularly on vinyl restoration techniques. Apparently Copeland died in 2006 without finishing the manuscript; parts of it are in desperate need of editing, and the info is dated in sports, but there's still a treasure-trove of good information there. Note that Copeland's approach is very scientific and engineering-based; subjective audiophiles may take issue with some of his opinions.
It's available as a free PDF at this link:
http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/pdf/analoguesoundrestoration.pdf
Copeland reportedly put about ten years of research into writing the document, and it's very well-done. Anybody who's trying to do restoration and mastering of vinyl, 78RPM discs, and analog tape should read it.
The late Peter Copeland wrote a handbook concerning analogue sound restoration. It is required reading. When Peter died in 2006, I despaired that this would ever see the light of day. In 2008-09, the British Library released it as a free PDF file available here.
The IASA “Green Book” TC-04 Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects can be purchased from IASA. The Second Edition is available online.
The CoOL (Conservation On Line) site has many resources. In particular, read Gilles St-Laurent’s 1996 article on The Care and Handling of Recorded Sound Materials.
The National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources March 2006 Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation: Report of a Roundtable Discussion of Best Practices for Transferring Analog Discs and Tapes
This Tape Timing Chart is approximate. Most reels will contain a bit more tape than indicated time implies, typically about 6%. The footage is actual.
These timings are for one program. There can be as many as four mono programs on one 1/4-inch tape.
The bottom-line is that destroying the originals after digitizing them should not be taken lightly. Really think about the implications. Put yourself 10 - 20 years in the future and think about what the implications of your decision might be. Is destroying the originals a decision that you will regret (or that your successors will regret)?
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