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History

Earthrise Photographed 47 Years Ago Today

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 23, 2013
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First Earthrise Photo Taken 47 Years Ago Today
“47 Years ago today, on 23 August 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 snapped the first photo of Earth as seen from lunar orbit. While a remarkable image at the time, the full resolution of the image was never retrieved from the data stored from the mission. In 2008, this earthrise image was restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. We obtained the original data tapes from the mission (the last surviving set) and restored original FR-900 tape drives to operational condition using both 60s era parts and modern electronics.”
More information on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project

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

9 responses to “Earthrise Photographed 47 Years Ago Today”

  1. npng says:
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    Kudos to all those on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project that took the initiative to perform this restoration work.

    • kcowing says:
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      Thanks. We still have a lot more to release including a number images that were never made public – and some no one has seen in nearly 50 years. Plus a few pics of Earth like you have never seen it before ….

      • npng says:
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        Excellent restoration work. Looking forward to more, I hope you continue. Absent your efforts, it seems these archival images would vanish into oblivion forever.

        • Steve Whitfield says:
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          Actually, they already had vanished. Keith and Dennis journeyed into oblivion and brought these tapes back to the real world. Restoring a hardware setup (abused obsolete tape drives) was nothing short of a miracle. I wonder what else is floating around in oblivion that we’d find real cool.

      • Todd Austin says:
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        How is the project progressing, Keith? What percentage done, how much longer to completion, etc.? What is the funding source these days?

        • kcowing says:
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          It started with private funding (from us) then NASA kicked in an abandoned building and some funding, then we raised funds earlier this year via crowd funding on RocketHub.

        • Denniswingo says:
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          To answer your question, we are over half way in the process at this time. We have over 60,000 framelets processed. It takes 98 framelets for a single high resolution image and 28 for a medium resolution image with just about an equal mix of high and medium resolution images processed.

          We have completed all of the captures from lunar orbiter 2, and 3 and are over halfway on lunar orbiter 5. We are continuing to capture images but we are getting down to our last operable heads so we may go back to the crowdfunding well soon.

  2. Littrow says:
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    Those were exciting days and I am glad I lived through them and was old enough and knew enough to pay attention. The work Keith and Dennis and anyone who is involved in the LOIRP are doing to recaptore and rebuild the data to a new spec is brilliant and they ought to be rewarded with something like a NASA Public Service Medal, if they haven’t already.

    • kcowing says:
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      Actually ( and I will be posting this story soon) Al Sturm, a member of our team who died recently, was given that award days before his death).