“Nancy Liggett Evans 11/22/1937 – 1/17/2020 was born to M. Margaret and Dr. Robert Samuel Liggett in Denver Colorado. She was married to E. Wayne Bamford bearing a daughter Megan Ann. She was later married to William J. Evans of Denver. Moving to California in the 70’s, she was employed in planetary exploration at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA headquarters and the California Institute of Technology. Known as the “mother” of […]

Today in 1966, the 1st view of Earth in the vicinity of the Moon was taken by Lunar Orbiter I. It was designed to scope out the lunar surface for potential landing sites, a task we'll do with modern @NASAMoon data as we work to send humans back to the Moon https://t.co/1RZySEN2i9 pic.twitter.com/zHBtvrqR1b — NASA (@NASA) August 23, 2018 Gee @NASA – would it be that hard for #NASA to […]

NASA Langley Engineer and Author John Newcomb Dies “An engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center during the critical Apollo years and those that successfully landed Viking on Mars, John Foster Newcomb passed away March 10, 2016. In the early heady days of space exploration, Newcomb worked on the Lunar Orbiter Project which placed five Lunar Orbiters around the moon, a mission critical to the success of the Apollo Project. The […]

Would-Be Rescuers of Wayward Spacecraft Previously Solved a NASA Mystery, New York Times “Before reviving a zombie spacecraft, Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing traveled to the past to rescue a trove of early moon photographs that otherwise would have been destined for oblivion. They did not actually time travel, but that might have been easier. Mr. Wingo, an entrepreneur and an engineer, and Mr. Cowing, the editor in chief of […]

The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos, Wired “Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald’s. You won’t get a burger there, though-its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who’ve rechristened the place McMoon’s. These self-described techno-archaeologists […]

Earth Before Earth Day “Long before man journeyed to the moon and looked back at the tiny, fragile planet that houses humanity, remote orbiters were sending back pictures of home. Sent to scope out potential landing sites on the Moon, the series of five Lunar Orbiters also sent back the earliest views of Earth from another celestial body. This image, taken in 1966 by Lunar Orbiter 1, is among the […]

The ‘Other’ Lunar Orbiter 1 Earthrise Image, Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project “A newly enhanced image of Earth taken from lunar orbit 47 years ago has been released. The image, taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966, is the latest in a series of images released by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). This image is actually one of a pair of images taken of Earth by Lunar Orbiter […]

Another Lunar Orbiter Earthrise Retrieved and Enhanced, Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project “The other day, as we were going through tapes from Lunar Orbiter IV we came across a picture of the Earth and the Moon – one that was not instantly familiar to us. This image is not included in the LPI Lunar Orbiter IV image gallery but is listed in another, more obscure document at LPI. So we […]

NASA Releases New Apollo 8 Earthrise Simulation Video “NASA has issued a new visualization of the events leading to one of the iconic photographs of the 20th Century – Earth rising over the moon captured by the crew of the Apollo 8 mission. The photo known as Earthrise is the first color photograph of Earth taken by a person in lunar orbit. Earthrise is the cover photo of TIME’s Great […]

Listening to the Deep Space Music Network, Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) “Dennis Wingo: A funny story from today. I was running a Lunar Orbiter tape today and all of a sudden I started hearing music coming from the audio speaker. It was really nice, staring out with a piano solo and then a couple of other pieces then a full on concert by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana […]