Old technology brought back to life with modern technology

I came across a website a while back thought was pretty cool. It was created by a bunch of hackers called Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project team (LOIRP) that had set up shop in an closed down Mc Donalds in Silicon Valley in 2008. They were working with Nasa to digitally restore the original image used to map the moon's surface prior to the first moon landing.

The lunar satellites that mapped the moon's surface took and developed the pictures onboard, these were then scanned and transmitted back to earth. Back at Nasa the transmitted pictures were reprinted because of the technology at the time the images were printed in stripes, these stripes were put together into sections in a lab and these sections were then reassembled in aircraft hanger into one large photo that was photograph using a crane to produce one complete photo. This meant that the quality was never as good as the original data received. 

The original received data was store on magnetic tapes the main type of storage at the time. These tapes were kept in to special climate controlled to facility to preserve them, but the machines that were used to read these tapes were lost. This is where the work be began. The Ampex FR-900 tape drives were military equipment so only a few were ever built, they were used by likes of the Air Force, the CIA and other government agencies. They were long since obsolete and had been tossed away.  They eventually found one in a barn that someone had save but it had be sitting for nearly 50 years without use. This had to be completely reengineered and rebuilt using modern equipment. Simple things like the tapes use whale oil for lubrication which was no long available had replace with a suitable substance. Luckily there were still people alive that developed this technology during the lunar program to assist them in the rebuild. 

When the tape drive was completed and the data could be read from the tapes, the next issue was decoding the data in a useable form. This was done using modern computers and newly created algorithms to decode the data and save the images in modern format using Photoshop to rejoin them into a single detailed image.  

Some of the high resolution digital images that were remastered were found to be extremely detailed for photos taken back in 1966 over 50 years ago, in fact they were comparable in quality to NASA’s most recent images of the moon. The remastered images were 40k+ in resolution to put that into prospective the current digital cinemas use 8k projectors, 4X standard HD.  So the remasters images are 20X current HD technology no bad for their age. 

The next project they are working on is to recapture an old satellite ISEE-3 that has been forgotten. They will have to figure out the original control commands before its close pass to the earth in August this year. If there are successful the satellite will put into earth orbit, to be reused in the study comets in the future. 

LOIRP website www.moonviews.com

Andrew Fitzgerald