The photos come from five successive satellites that NASA sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967
Seven self-proclaimed hackers have managed to reproduce approximately 2,000 images of the Moon's surface, after processing 1,500 analog tapes that NASA had neglected.
The photos come from five successive satellites that NASA sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967. With the primary purpose of searching for the best areas for landing manned missions, the satellites photographed the lunar surface from a distance of about 50 kilometers, transmitting the information back to Earth, where it was stored on Ampex FR-900 floppy disks.
The photos were then usually printed on paper and were so large that NASA rented warehouses or even old churches to hang them for use by scientists.
After printing, the floppy disks were stored in boxes and over time were forgotten, until they were saved from complete destruction by chance.
Several attempts have been made over the last decade to digitize the content of magnetic disks, but without success as this technology has become obsolete.
However, the combination of the expertise of some former NASA engineers and private individuals who had the appropriate machines (the size of a refrigerator) to process the data led to the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) initiative.
The LOIRP team settled in an abandoned McDonald's at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, in 2007. From this base, which was later renamed McMoon's, the seven engineers are trying to salvage the treasures hidden in the discs by converting their contents into digital form.
Many of the discs had to be extensively modified to solve compatibility problems, while the subsequent processing of the digital data posed new technical difficulties.
The successful reproduction of the famous Earth sunrise as seen from the moon convinced NASA to fund the initiative, and now LOIRP can boast that they have rescued terabytes of images from the Moon and have every reason to continue the modern archaeology they are performing.
Source: cretalive.gr
