Forgotten Apollo Era Moon Imagery Found
Misplaced High Resolution Lunar Orbiter Imagery Found After 46 Years
“High resolution imagery from the Lunar Orbiter program, forgotten for nearly 50 years, has been retrieved from original data tapes. The five Lunar Orbiter missions, flown between 1966 and 1967, were rather heavily documented. This extensive documentation has helped us at the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) to locate images on the original analog data tapes and retrieve them at a resolution that was impossible in the 1960s. While the Lunar Orbiter program was methodical in documenting everything, every now and then imagery slipped through the crack. Often times the misplaced images are unremarkable and incomplete. However, in this case, we have found complete high resolution imagery of a location close to the Apollo 15 landing site at Hadley Rille. The imagery we have uncovered is number 5105 taken by Lunar Orbiter V in 1967.”
I love my job!
Many of us love your job! Please keep up the good work.
We will!
I can’t wait to use your recovered images with NASA’s eyes, makes me almost want to get back into lightwave and build my own model and texture map it with the new higher resolution maps. I think my Nvida quadro 4000 won’t hesitate a bit resolving such a large image, probably a special way to program the image processing to take advantage of the cuda cores.
Recently saw a show called The Brink, that contained a small segment on Mc Moon, a location adjacent to NASA Ames, inside an old MC Donald’s Building. They were doing very high resolution imagery processing from tapes made during the Lunar Orbiter missions, the resolution was much higher than what is available on JPL’s NASA’s eyes, I look forward to being able to update the texture map with the new data when they make that feature available.
That is where Dennis Wingo and I run the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) i.e. the project that retrieved this image. We call the building “McMoons”. More info at http://www.moonviews.com
sweet! that is most excellent! My 3 year old is somewhat into the moon at the moment, yes that sounds silly but at this point it takes a 3 year old to get to Mars on the time scale that is currently being worked. I’m definitely for putting large automated boring and mining equipment on the back side of the moon to start construction of a moon research facility as well as a Radio telescope and the largest reflector telescope conceivable also on the moon. In addition a facility for doing a very detailed study of the asteroid belts for mining candidates, that would be the pay day is the detailed spectral and geometric visual study of the entire belt. Plus since you’re up there you can start looking for extremely rare elements deposited by comets and meteors. I had build a very exact model of my moon base and brought it to school the day the Challenger blew up, watched that happen live in the class room, so frustrating how budget admins react to accidents in experimental programs. We would have never got to the moon with the same logic working now.