The LOIRP Project has reached a major milestone of having two Ampex FR-900 Instrumentation Tape Drives operational at once. This will allow us to accelerate the production of images. This is probably the first time in 30 years that two FR-900s have been operational in the same room at the same time.

Austin Epps sitting in the LOIRP lab at "McMoons" at NASA Ames Research Center downloading imagery from an original Lunar Orbiter data tape using a restored FR-900 tape drive on 18 August 2009

On Monday evening a lavish reception was held at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. The emcee for the event was Neil deGrasse Tyson. At one point, Tyson talked about the recent LRO images taken of the Apollo landing sites - and the hardware left behind. Our Apollo 11 landing site image was used to set the context for the LRO picture. Mention was also made of the LOIRP - Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. Here is a video shot with a small camera of Tyson's comments regarding our image.

This video features a press Conference held at NASA Ames Research Center on 13 November 2008 where our first recovered Lunar Orbiter image was unveiled and discussed.

Note: The LOIRP segment starts at 2:14

This video shows a Lunar Orbiter image framelet being retrieved from an original data tape using a restored FR-900 tape drive. Watch the monitor between the two tape drives as portions of the image (negative image) roll across the screen. This activity is part of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) underway at NASA ARC.