Image below: The FR-900 drives in Nancy Evan's garage - the first time we saw them in February 2007. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
More images below
Image below: Closeup of the FR-900 drives in Nancy Evan's garage - the first time we saw them in February 2007. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: The FR-900 drives in Nancy Evan's garage had some neighbors living a few feet away. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: Interior of one of the FR-900 tape drives before refurbishment began. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: Loading the tapes into our rental trucks in April 2007. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: The rental trucks that Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing drove up to NASA ARC from Southern California with the tape drives and data tapes in April 2007. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: Lunar Orbiter tapes in boxes on storage pallets. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: A Lunar Orbiter data tapes being opened for the first time in 40 years. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: Half of the total collection of Lunar Orbiter data tapes. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: Dennis Wingo, Co-Lead of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) at work processing images retrieved using the FR-900 tape drive. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: McMoons at NASA ARC - home of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: ANother view of McMoons at NASA ARC - home of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: Keith Cowing, Co-Lead of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) standing next to the FR-900 tape drive shortly after it was first powered up. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Image below: Austin Epps (L) and Ken Zin (R) standing next to the FR-900 tape drive shortly after it was first powered up. Copyright Credit: MOONVIEWS.COM. Reproduction prohibited without obtaining prior permission.
Comments (19)
Excellent work! These images have unequaled resolution (so far). I had thought the tapes degraded, lost or destroyed, or at the very least, unreadable due to lost devices to read them. Didn't some of the readers get stolen?
Posted by James Fincannon | November 13, 2008 2:13 PM
Posted on November 13, 2008 14:13
magnificent Thank you!
Posted by samuel rumberger | November 13, 2008 2:26 PM
Posted on November 13, 2008 14:26
This is astonishing stuff. Thanks and congratulations to all involved for preserving some priceless history!
Posted by Earl Green | November 13, 2008 2:50 PM
Posted on November 13, 2008 14:50
Wow. Tape drives. This REALLY looks like a Lab, run by Scientists.
Posted by Chris O'Neil | November 13, 2008 2:57 PM
Posted on November 13, 2008 14:57
Congratulations to the team! This is absolutely astounding. Talk about luck coming together in finding the tapes and the machines.
There is a story that some IBM data tapes are being recovered in Australia from the Apollo missions relating to moondust.
The big missing piece is the collection of slow-scan TV original recordings on instrumentation tape. I can play those tapes, but I don't have the video decoder.
This is all so exciting...nothing like recovering this just about at the last minute. The magnetic record on tapes does not degrade unless it's exposed to magnetic fields, but the machines, the knowledge about the machines, and the tape chemistry all degrade much faster than the actual magnetic record.
Cheers,
Richard
Posted by Richard L. Hess | November 13, 2008 4:08 PM
Posted on November 13, 2008 16:08
Wow, I used to eat at the McDonnalds at Moffett and now it's a computer room.... Great work everyone!
Posted by Ken Anderson | November 13, 2008 5:30 PM
Posted on November 13, 2008 17:30
You did it! You did it! You did it!
Contratulations.
I've wanted to see this for decades.
(I didn't really think when I tried to post a comment last night you'd actually gotten the tapes, a drive and gotten them working!)
Now for the Lunar Orbiter 3 image with Surveyor 1 and it's shadow!
Posted by Edwin Strickland | November 14, 2008 12:36 AM
Posted on November 14, 2008 00:36
Great job.. Its great to see foresight protect old equipment like this. The chances all this info would have been lost forever are unimaginable if someone didnt take the hardware home instead of breaking it down. She deserves a medal or something for having the foresight to save this.
You would have thought NASA would have sent this to the Smithsonian for storage and not just throw it away. Even odder that they would keep the tapes but throw away the reader...
The Question begs to be asked.. are there more of these types of tapes from the 60s and such without readers? Or can this reader read those tapes. is there data from the Apollo missions that maybe is this same condition sitting and unused, and on the edge of being lost forever.
Posted by Charles Goin | November 14, 2008 7:12 AM
Posted on November 14, 2008 07:12
why did McDonald's leave this location?
Editor's note: not enough customers.
Posted by Gyuszi Bacsi | November 14, 2008 7:27 AM
Posted on November 14, 2008 07:27
Hi,
Thanks for your efforts! The restored and enhanced images look wonderful, better resolution and more natural looking. Can't wait to see the "photo of the century"...Copernicus.
Regards,
John Kirchhoff
Hudson, MI USA
Posted by john kirchhoff | November 15, 2008 11:49 PM
Posted on November 15, 2008 23:49
you said....Now for the Lunar Orbiter 3 image with Surveyor 1 and it's shadow!
Ok.... Anything Surveyor is indeed wanted at this end...
As a kid saw it being built at Hughes...
Ed Sharpe, Archivist for SMECC
www.smecc.org
Posted by ed sharpe | November 20, 2008 9:13 AM
Posted on November 20, 2008 09:13
Great to see! Thanks for sharing.
I suggest that you use torrents file sharing technology to share the restored pics and films, for saving them to the future generations.
greetings from Sweden
Posted by Gagarin Miljkovich | November 23, 2008 8:32 PM
Posted on November 23, 2008 20:32
this is so precious and significant.. thanks for all who make this possible.. lovely
Posted by Joseph Cecil Smith | December 7, 2008 1:33 PM
Posted on December 7, 2008 13:33
Surfed onto t his site from the John Lear web site and am astounded by the work and dedication these guys have down in order to preserve the data that wasonce considered lost, maybe a fine tooth search should be made of all NASA facilities to see if any tapes reamin and have them logged and set in a secure place for future acess, who knows if a BEST OF tape was made of the Apollo 11 slo-scan moon vid and it is langushing away in some mis-labled can in a OHIO wharehouse.GOOD JOB
Posted by Gary | March 23, 2009 1:36 PM
Posted on March 23, 2009 13:36
Thank you for doing this!
Two of my most-prized items in my book collection are "The Moon as Viewed by Lunar Orbiter" and "Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon". Thank you for preserving these originals!
Posted by Fred Kiesche | March 26, 2009 5:28 PM
Posted on March 26, 2009 17:28
Incredible work. I still remember doing a report on the Apollo11 project as a kid in the late 70s, and I became an early fan of astronomy and still remember looking at the moon one night, on our way home from a family dinner. Congratulations to the entire team. words fail to describe nancy evan's tenacity of storing the tape drive readers in her BARN for two decades. Merely unbelievable. Belated thanks to NASA and the bureaucrats for finally waking up, and righting past wrongs and oversights.
Posted by Patrick in Vancouver BC canada | March 29, 2009 9:22 PM
Posted on March 29, 2009 21:22
I have to wonder how hard it would be to make a new tape drive that can read that media. Seems to me that the critical thing would be either finding an original read head, or having the specs for the correct head gap.
-jcr
Posted by John C. Randolph | April 9, 2009 3:36 AM
Posted on April 9, 2009 03:36
When did you move into the McDonalds? The date says April 2007, but I worked at Ames when the restaurant closed in April 2008.
You guys did excellent job getting the FR-900 to send data to your Macs. The images are amazing.
Allan
Posted by Allan | April 9, 2009 9:23 AM
Posted on April 9, 2009 09:23
any updates coming ?
Posted by luptems | June 7, 2009 4:17 PM
Posted on June 7, 2009 16:17