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Moon

Dumpster Diving for Science

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 5, 2013
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According to Science magazine: NASA Dives Into Its Past to Retrieve Vintage Satellite Data:
“They cleaned, rebuilt, and reassembled one drive, then designed and built equipment to convert the analog signals into an exact 16-bit digital copy. “It was like dumpster diving for science,” says Cowing, co-team leader at LOIRP. In November 2008, the team recovered their first image: a famous picture of an earthrise taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 on 23 August 1966. The team’s new high-resolution version was so crisp and clear that it revealed many previously obscured details, such as a fog bank lying along the coast of Chile. “We thought if the Earth’s surface looks that good a quarter of a million miles away, what does the moon’s surface look like 100 miles beneath it?” says Cowing.”
Keith’s note: A number of us have been donating time and money to this project since 2008. Please support the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at RocketHub as our team works to finish this project.
More information on this image can be found here and here as we overlaid Nimbus II imagery on a Lunar Orbiter image of Earth. Oh yes, on this date, in New York City, just over the Earth’s limb as seen from lunar orbit, the Beatles were preparing to play at Shea Stadium …

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

6 responses to “Dumpster Diving for Science”

  1. Jafafa Hots says:
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    I’m still wondering if there’s anything interesting on the 20 some-odd NASA telemetry tapes from the early 60s that are in my garage.

    • kcowing says:
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      You’ll never know unless you look!

      • Jafafa Hots says:
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         Yeah… unfortunately I have no way of looking. Maybe nobody does… who knows if there’s even a machine out there capable of reading them…
        All I have is what’s written on a few labels, stuff I don’t understand. Tower verification, vertical verification test, missile number, flight numbers, which channels have voice, radar, video, clock, bunches of acronyms that I don’t understand (eots? rcd? etc.), and dates from 1962 to 1965.

        • Denniswingo says:
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          There are ways of reading these tapes that does not involve a 60’s era tape drive.  It is just that our tapes are massively more data intensive that it cannot be done that way.

  2. Steven Rappolee says:
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    try to raise awareness and funds by using this platform,

    http://www.indiegogo.com/