The Ampex FR-900 and AR-550 design teams. The FR-900 tape drives are the large units in the background and were used to record images sent back by the Lunar Orbiter missions. We have two refurbished FR-900s at the LOIRP at McMoons at NASA Ames Research Center. The smaller tape drive in front, the AR-550 is the flight version of the FR-900 and was flown aboard Skylab.

The Ampex AR-550 design team.

A Real Estate Deal That Spans The Earth, NPR

"As it turns out, the greatest interest in the property has been because of that satellite dish. NASA contractor Dennis Wingo is seriously looking at it. He's advising a team competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, a $20 million award for the first privately funded team to get a rover to travel on the moon. "We would control them from here," Wingo says. "To me, that's way more fun than worrying about the past. As important as the past is, I kind of look forward toward the future." At this point, Wingo hasn't made an offer, so the property is still on the market. The asking price for the dish, the bunker and the land: $4.2 million."

Technologies that we've lost - and the quest to find them again, io9

"I asked NASA Watch's Keith Cowing about this, and he explained that this is just an urban legend. The schematics are all still around, mostly on microfiche, and any ancient computer files just hold images of the original plans as opposed to now unreadably obsolete data. Still, while the knowledge wasn't lost, it was certainly forgotten, and worse, it was badly organized. As Cowing - himself working on the rediscovery of old NASA documents with the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project - told me, all this archival information was basically abandoned until NASA's started working on the Constellation program last decade, and now that that project has been forgotten the information is again beginning to gather dust. If there is a point of disconnect, it's more in terms of how we understand the information and the different ways in which we approach science forty-five years on:"

"If anything's missing, it's actually more the explanation. I mean there is some stuff that will never be found again, but it's all there, and the stuff that isn't you can sort of figure out backwards. Sometimes you need the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone, because sometimes the way we think today is not the way they thought back then. Sometimes you need an index or a document that explains how they did things or their nomenclature. That's the one thing that's sometimes hard to find is what I call a bridge document, an answer guide to how they did the thing back in the sixties. There's no FAQ."

Source, Gemini VII.

Restored Photos: Project Gemini Comes to Life

"On 23 March 1965, the first of ten crewed Gemini spacecraft was launched carrying it's crew of two astronauts, Gus Grissom and John Young. The NASA Johnson Space Center and the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University today proudly unveil the Project Gemini Online Digital Archive. The archive contains the first high-resolution digital scans of the original Gemini flight films, now available in several formats with a click of your mouse."

The five Lunar Orbiter missions took photographs of the Moon and processed them - on film - in lunar orbit - via a chemical process developed by Eastman Kodak - one that is somewhat similar to Polaroid's instant film products. The developed images were scanned and sent back to Earth and stored as analog data. After the missions were completed the tapes and rives were stored and then forgotten. A generation later, in 2008, the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) re-engineered the original tape drives and re-processed the original mission analog data tapes - using 21st Century processing capabilities to produce dramatically enhanced versions of these iconic and historic images. We wholeheartedly believe that there are new things than can be learned from old stuff. As such, when we learned of this effort to save - and continue - the Polaroid analog image process (Kodak's competitor), well, we had to support it.

According to Wikipedia:

"Polaroid Corporation is an American-based international consumer electronics and eyewear company, originally founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land. It is most famous for its instant film cameras, which reached the market in 1948, and continued to be the company's flagship product line until the February 2008 decision to cease all production in favor of digital photography products.[1] The company's original dominant market was in polarized sunglasses, an outgrowth of Land's self-guided research in polarization after leaving Harvard University after his freshman year—he later returned to Harvard to continue his research."

According to the project's website:

"We're always dreaming about making the impossible possible and lately we can't stop thinking about a new Impossible camera. We envision a high quality camera that is optimized to make the best out of our new, constantly improving film materials.

Stay tuned to learn more as soon as things evolve."

According to ITT (which bought Kodak):

"Photos were processed automatically by the Orbiter's photographic system as the spacecraft orbited the Moon's dark side. This operation was performed by a KODAK BITMAT diffusion transfer process using 'dry' chemistry. A high-intensity light beam then optically scanned the photographic prints, and the images were transmitted to receiving stations on Earth."

Additional information

Hunt for Apollo’s lost dog Snoopy, Skymania

"Astronomers are teaming up with schools to use robotic telescopes over the internet to scan the night sky and find the spacecraft. The telescopes, part of the Faulkes Telescope Project run by Glamorgan University, are in Hawaii and Australia meaning schools can look with them during normal lesson times in the UK."

Research led by astrophysicists at the University of Warwick has resolved a 40 year old problem with observations of turbulence in the solar wind first made by the probe Mariner Five. The research resolves an issue with what is by far the largest and most interesting natural turbulence lab accessible to researchers today.

Our current understanding tells us that turbulence in the solar wind should not be affected by the speed and direction of travel of that solar wind. However when the first space probes attempted to measure that turbulence they found their observations didn't quite match that physical law. The first such data to be analysed from Mariner 5 in 1971 found a small but nonetheless irritatingly clear pattern in the turbulence perpendicular to both the direction of the travel and the magnetic field the solar wind was travelling through.

A 'real-time data translator' machine converted a Mariner 4 digital image data into numbers printed on strips of paper. Too anxious to wait for the official processed image, employees from the Voyager Telecommunications Section at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, attached these strips side by side to a display panel and hand colored the numbers like a paint-by-numbers picture. More.

"In the years since Miller's initial experiments, scientists have come to believe that the atmosphere of primitive Earth wasn't made up of the same gases that he used in his initial study. But volcanic eruptions were likely very common during the early history of the planet and these volcanoes could have emitted clouds rich in hydrogen, methane and H2S, which would create conditions similar to Miller's experiments in limited geographic areas. The spark could have been supplied by lightning, which is commonly associated with volcanic clouds." More

The NASA Goddard Library TIROS-1 Photographic Atlas Collection of Weather Photos from Space and the "First" Weather Image
91st American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting
Wednesday, 26 January 2011: 4:15 PM
304 (Washington State Convention Center)
Gene Major, Library Associates, NASA/GSFC Library, Lanham, MD

TIROS 1, the Television Infra-Red Observation Satellite, was launched 50 years ago on April 1, 1960 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the first satellite designed to observe clouds from space and is the precursor to dozens of meteorological operational and research satellites. TIROS only lasted 3 months, but it made 1,392 orbits and took nearly 23,000 pictures. The NASA Goddard Library has a rare and unique collection of 26 bound volumes of TIROS 1 photography prepared by the Navy in 1961 specifically for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This talk will highlight the collection, attempts contemplated to preserve it, and revelations that the "first" image from TIROS, widely distributed around the internet (and even by NOAA and NASA), was not the first photo, nor even taken on the first day of operations!

State-of-the-art seismological techniques applied to Apollo-era data suggest our moon has a core similar to Earth's. Uncovering details about the lunar core is critical for developing accurate models of the moon's formation. The data sheds light on the evolution of a lunar dynamo -- a natural process by which our moon may have generated and maintained its own strong magnetic field.

The team's findings suggest the moon possesses a solid, iron-rich inner core with a radius of nearly 150 miles and a fluid, primarily liquid-iron outer core with a radius of roughly 205 miles. Where it differs from Earth is a partially molten boundary layer around the core estimated to have a radius of nearly 300 miles. The research indicates the core contains a small percentage of light elements such as sulfur, echoing new seismology research on Earth that suggests the presence of light elements -- such as sulfur and oxygen -- in a layer around our own core.

Image; A partial view of the Apollo 16 Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) in deployed configuration on the lunar surface as photographed during the mission's first extravehicular activity (EVA-1), on April 21, 1972. The Passive Seismic Experiment (PSE) is in the foreground center; Central Station (C/S) is in center background, with the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) to the left. One of the anchor flags for the Active Seismic Experiment (ASE) is at right. high res (1.5 M) low res (116 K)

Israel to put Dead Sea scrolls online, AFP

"The Dead Sea scrolls, containing some of the oldest-known surviving biblical texts, are to go online as part of a collaboration between Israeli antiquities authorities and Google, developers said on Tuesday. The 3.5 million dollar (2.5 million euro) project by the Israeli Antiquities Authority and the Internet giant's local R&D division aims to use space-age technology to produce the clearest renderings yet of the ancient scrolls and make them available free of charge to the public. "This is the most important discovery of the 20th century, and we will be sharing it with the most advanced technology of the next century," IAA project director Pnina Shor told reporters in Jerusalem. The IAA will begin by using multi-spectral imaging technology developed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration to produce high-resolution images of the sometimes-faded texts that may reveal new letters and words."

NASA Solicitation: Retrieval of Nimbus Observational Data

"NASA/GSFC intends to purchase the items from HOV Services, LLC. Two types of high-end photo scanners are required to scan Nimbus film data: the first must be equivalent to the Leica air photo scanners used to scan NASA's Heat Capacity mapping Mission frames for the CDMP. Nimbus film was processed on similar devices as HCMM film. The Second is a film scanner normally used for scanning medical X-rays. This type of device is needed to digitize the longer (i.e., 21") film scenes at 600 dpi. This film is similar to the old B&W satellite film from Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. The facilities need to be located within 50 miles of the NASA's film archive at GSFC and WNRC. This allows for Government inspection of the scanning and indexing process and ensures the per-image shipping costs are at a minimum with respect to the per-image scanning costs. HOV Services has unique experience in configuring both scanners needed for NASA-type film archives, scanning and indexing all of the NASA film from HCMM mission as part of the NOAA Climate Data Modernization Program (CDMP). NOAA CDMP has partnered with HOV Services since 1999 to digitize and index Defense Meteorological Satellite film records that are from the same era as the Nimbus Film records."

- Nimbus II and Lunar Orbiter 1 Imagery: A New Look at Earth in 1966
- National Snow and Ice Data Center on LOIRP
- LOIRP Aids In Finding Google Earth Images from 1966
- Dumpster Diving for Science