Media and Metadata
Shortly after moving into McMoon's, a group of students from the NASA Astrobiology Academy was recruited to remove all the tapes from the boxes, and put the tapes in order. Each tape takes about an hour to run on the tape drive, and holds one high-resolution image and one medium-resolution image. When archived in the early 1970s, each reel of tape was labeled, wrapped in a clear plastic bag, and enclosed in a mu-metal tin, and sealed with yellow plastic tape. Additional labels have been placed on the outside of the tape container. Each tape is labeled with a code that usually consists of two letters and two numbers, for example: MT_19, WT_45, and GT_46. One of the Astrobiology Academy students realized that the first letter indicated which ground station recorded the data on the tape in that container: "M" indicates that the tape was recorded in Madrid, Spain; "W" indicates that the tape was recorded in Woomera, Australia; and "G" indicates that the tape was recorded in Goldstone, California. This guess was confirmed when the team listened to the audio track at the beginning of a few of the tapes, wherein the operator of the ground station recites information about the tape and the recording. On tapes marked with an "M", the operator has a distinctly Latin accent. On tapes marked with a "W", the operator has a distinctly Australian accent. On tapes marked with a "G" the operator speaks with an American accent. Sometimes audio track captures an operator at one tracking station talking to an operator at another tracking station. Each tape's opening audio includes the date that the tape was recorded in both local and Universal Time.
There are many other confusing problems with the tapes. Each tape is supposed to hold a complete pair of images, but some contain just a few minutes of audio signal, and some contain the same tiny portion of an image, over and over. In the early stages of the project, the team wanted to rescue images that have the most value and impact, but they found that it was very time intensive to find images in this disordered array of tapes.
Read more about this topic: Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
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