Prior to NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing in ‘69, NASA sent several several orbiters to photograph the surface of the moon so that they could, among other things, choose a landing site. The data that was transmitted back was recorded on large magnetic tapes, and then transferred to photographic film for analysis. However, because of the limits of the technology available at the time, the images retrieved were of a much lower resolution than the original photos taken by the orbiters. Once NASA was done analyzing the data, all the tapes were mothballed in Maryland. In the mid-1980s, they were transferred to JPL, under the care of Nancy Evans.
A few years later, with assistance from Mark Nelson from Caltech, Nancy started a project to obtain the raw analog data from those tapes by obtaining surplus FR-900 tape drives, refurbishing them, and digitizing the analog data on the tapes. Nancy and Mark were successful in that they were able to pull the data. But their funding lapsed forcing them to discontinue their work at NASA. As a result Nancy and Mark left NASA and obtained the tape drives as government surplus hardware in an attempt to raise private funds to continue their project. Unfortunately they were unable to secure the funding, so the equipment sat in Nancy’s garage until 2007, when she started looking for someone to pick up where she left off.
Dennis Wingo (president of the aerospace engineering company SkyCorp) heard about the drives and went to Keith Cowing (former NASA employee) to see if he could help get things rolling. Cowing convinced some former coworkers at NASA’s Ames Research Center to find them some space for the equipment. And, according to the ‘This is True’ newsletter, Cowing initially paid for the project himself. And the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) was formed. LOIP was given a closed down McDonald’s restaurant (now called McMoons) as their lab. Few dates were mentioned in what I’ve read, but it appears that LOIP was started sometime in April of 2007 or shortly thereafter.
On November 13, 2008 NASA held a press conference where they released the first image that had been restored, a 42-year-old image of Earth… one of the first images of earth from outer space, taken on August 23, 1966.
For more information and samples of the images, please check out:
November 13th’s Press Release from NASA
MoonViews – operated by Keith Cowing
Thanks go out to This Is True for letting me know about LOIRP and for some of the back story that wasn’t included on any of the official sites.
