Background
The images taken by the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were primarily used to locate landing sites for the manned Apollo missions. Once those missions were over, the data was largely forgotten since it had served its purpose. The original tapes were carefully archived for 20 years by the government in Maryland. When the tapes were released back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, in 1986, the decision of whether to scrap the tapes became the responsibility of JPL archivist Nancy Evans. She decided that the tapes should be preserved. She recalled, "I could not morally get rid of this stuff".
Within a few years, Nancy Evans and a few colleagues were able to start a small project with funding from NASA. They managed to find four rare Ampex FR-900 tape drives—highly specialized drives that had only been used by government agencies such as the FAA, USAF, and NASA. (The FR-900's transport was adapted from the 2" Quadruplex videotape format, only in the FR-900's case, the drive was designed to record a wideband analog signal of any type for instrumentation or other purposes, rather than specifically a video signal as in 2" Quad's case.) Over time, Evan's team also collected documentation and spare parts for the tape drives from various government surplus sources. The project was successful at getting raw analog data from the tapes, but in order to generate the images, they discovered that they needed the specialized demodulation hardware that had been used by the Lunar Orbiter program, which no longer existed. They attempted to get funding from NASA and private sources to build the hardware, but were unsuccessful. Eventually, both Nancy Evans and Mark Nelson went on to other projects while the tape drives sat in Nancy Evans' garage.
In 2004, Philip Horzempa was doing research on the Lunar Orbiter program at the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C. In the archives, he happened to come across a memo from 1996 containing a proposal by Mark Nelson to digitize the Lunar Orbiter images, as described above. After about a year of searching, Horzempa was able to make contact with Mark Nelson. The two of them decided to restart the Lunar Orbiter tape recovery effort and find funding. They made contact with Jen Heldmann of NASA Ames.
In early 2007, Horzempa commented on the Lunar Orbiter tape recovery effort on a Web forum, NASASpaceflight.com. As a result, Dennis Wingo contacted Philip Horzempa through that forum. Horzempa put Wingo in contact with Nelson and Evans and invited Wingo to join the team. In addition to the tape drives mentioned above, Nelson had been able to obtain several tape heads. The tape drives were absolutely essential to any effort to read the original Lunar Orbiter data tapes.
Dennis Wingo is president of the aerospace engineering company SkyCorp and a long-time veteran of space and computing technologies. He knew he could muster the technical skills to tackle the management of renovating the tape drives, he could find contacts at NASA, and most importantly, he knew that the Moon was becoming a hot property again. Wingo said, "I knew the value of the tape drives and the tapes". Another group thought the same, writing, "future missions to the Moon have re-energized the lunar community and renewed interest in the Lunar Orbiter data".
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was set to go to the Moon in 2009, and one of its primary goals was to determine the risk to people working on the surface of the Moon. The LRO would create images of the surface that could be compared to the highest resolution images taken of the Moon during the Apollo era. The original Lunar Orbiter images are the highest resolution images of the Moon that had ever been taken until the LRO started taking images in the fall of 2009. The Lunar Orbiter images would be invaluable to scientists studying changes in the Moon's surface.
Read more about this topic: Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
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