Search For The Missing Tapes
News that these analog data tapes were missing broke on August 5, 2006 when the printed and online versions of The Sydney Morning Herald published a story with the title One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures. The missing tapes were among over 700 boxes of magnetic data tapes recorded throughout the Apollo program which have not been found. On August 16, 2006 NASA announced its official search saying, "The original tapes may be at the Goddard Space Flight Center … or at another location within the NASA archiving system", "NASA engineers are hopeful that when the tapes are found they can use today's digital technology to provide a version of the moonwalk that is much better quality than what we have today." NASA also had ongoing research reasons for finding these higher resolution tapes, since Project Orion was planned to carry out tasks similar to those of the original Apollo program, to "Get a team of astronauts to the moon and back safely".
The Goddard Center's Data Evaluation Laboratory has the only known surviving piece of equipment which can read the missing tapes and was set to be closed in October 2006, causing some fear that, even if the tapes were later found, there would be no ready way to read and copy them. However, equipment that could read the tapes was maintained.
On November 1, 2006 Cosmos Magazine reported that some NASA telemetry tapes from the Apollo project era had been found in a small marine science laboratory within the main physics building at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. One of these tapes was sent to NASA for analysis. It carried no video but did show that if any of the tapes are ever found, data could likely be read from them.
Read more about this topic: Apollo 11 Missing Tapes
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