NASA News Conference
On July 16, 2009 NASA held a media briefing in which the agency released somewhat crisper-looking (and otherwise cleaned-up), post-conversion video from the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, some of which had been in storage for nearly 40 years. They meanwhile had concluded that the reels of tape with the SSTV signal were shipped from Australia to Goddard and then routinely erased and reused a few years later. Moreover, a backup copy of the tapes which had been made in Australia was also erased after Goddard received the reels. There is also documentation that two hours of the Apollo 11 moonwalk SSTV were recorded in Australia on a different tape format but likewise, these other tapes have not been found. The SSTV signal had been recorded on telemetry data tapes mostly as a backup which could be held in readiness and played back later if the real-time conversion and broadcast around the world failed. Since this real-time broadcast indeed worked and was widely recorded on both videotape and film, the backup video was not deemed important at the time.
NASA stated that it did find several post-conversion copies of the video that are of higher quality than has been seen by the public. These include videotape recorded in Sydney after the conversion but before the satellite transmission around the world, videotape from CBS News archives (direct from NASA, without commentary), and kinescopes at Johnson Space Center. In 2009, NASA released some partially restored samples. The full restoration of the footage, about three hours long, was completed in December 2009. Highlights of this fully enhanced video were shown to the public for the first time at the Australian Geographic Society Awards on 6 October 2010, where Buzz Aldrin was the guest of honor.
Read more about this topic: Apollo 11 Missing Tapes
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