Printing The Moon One Character At A Time
Printing The Moon, Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
“As clever as we thought we were, we were not the first team to tackle the issue of generating high resolution imagery. Someone tried to do much of what we were doing today – but did so with technology available in the 1960s. We were recently contacted by someone who had seen our project’s Facebook page. His name is Joe Watson and he worked on a project that used computer printers that worked like giant electric typewriters – but using varying sizes of squares instead of letters. With this system and a lot of creativity, Watson and his team created immense high resolution versions of Lunar Orbiter images from which topographic maps were made.”
I have to wonder, if something as fabulous and work-intensive as these lunar photos were done for NASA and returned to NASA, and used to determine the lunar landing site, why is it that an outsider from 45 year ago had to make it known. What other fabulous goodies does NASA have, and what other impressive projects have they done, that we seem to have no way of knowing about? NASA has a History office, the PAO, and umpteen libraries. Why is it that there never appears to have been a master project register of any sort compiled that can be accessed to see if work similar to current projects has already been done, and what data they can provide? To me, this is probably NASA’s biggest failure ever.Steve
Well, the LOIRP is trying to save as much of this as it can and NASA has been exceptionally supportive.
It’s all about money, deadlines, etc. While you’re struggling to make the launch deadline, things like archiving aren’t high priority. Once you’ve got to the deadline, you’re off on the next project. If someone made “archiving and cataloging” a “you can’t launch if you don’t do this”, and held the line on waivers of that, then, sure things would be a lot more findable.
Also, bear in mind that filing technology is always changing. We’re just now starting to get some images from older JPL archives online, and even then, it’s just page after page of “image #X” without much indexing information. It’s not cheap to scan all this stuff in (or convert the formats), nor is it cheap to figure out what that image is, in the first place (esp when the people who were responsible for it retired 20 years ago).
Great post Keith, thanks for sharing that story, very interesting.
We were just completely blown away when we got the email from the fellow that did this work. He still has some of the print outs. I have never seen any mention of this anywhere in any NASA histories.
Amazingly to me, my very first significant job was as a field engineer in 1978 actually maintaining printers a generation or two beyond the IBM 1403 printer shown in the referenced article.
This Wiki is a very good description of the IBM 1403 printer that was used to make these images.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…