The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) is a project funded by NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

, SkyCorp Inc, SpaceRef Interactive, Inc., and private individuals to digitize the original analog data tapes from the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that were sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967.

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

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The facility is headquartered in the city of Pasadena on the border of La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena...

 (JPL) in Pasadena, California

Pasadena, California

Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...

, 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

Ampex

Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence...

 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

Transport (recording)

A transport is a device that handles a particular physical storage medium itself, and extracts or records the information to and from the medium, to an outboard set of processing electronics that the transport is connected to.A transport houses no electronics itself for encoding and decoding the...

 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

Instrumentation

Instrumentation is defined as the art and science of measurement and control of process variables within a production, or manufacturing area....

 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

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

The Lunar Precursor Robotic Program is a program of robotic spacecraft missions which NASA will use to prepare for future human spaceflight missions to the Moon. Two LPRP missions, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite , were launched in June 2009...

 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.

Expertise and facilities

In February 2007 Dennis Wingo visited the four Ampex

Ampex

Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence...

 FR-900 tape drives for the first time in Nancy Evans' garage. Each drive was about 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, 3 foot (0.9144 m) wide, as deep as a refrigerator, weighed 600 pounds (272.2 kg) and was coated with a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. They were stored with a pallet of manuals and schematics for the tape drives, along with hard copies of data related to the lunar images. Meanwhile, the tapes were stored safely in a climate-controlled warehouse. There were about 1,500 tapes, all packed into boxes, stacked four deep on pallets, and shrink-wrapped.

Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and President of SpaceRef Interactive, Inc. now served as co-leads the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). Both Cowing and Wingo provided the funds required to get the project started. They spent about a year looking for funding, facilities, documentation and expertise. Dr. S. Pete Worden, NASA Ames Research Center Director, agreed to store the tapes drives and tapes in unused warehouse space until funding and facilities could be found to begin the restoration project. In April 2007 NASA JPL released the tapes to the custody of Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California

Mountain View, California

-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...

. Nancy Evans also transferred ownership of the FR-900 drives to Wingo and Cowing. Wingo and Cowing rented two large trucks, loaded up the tape drives and documentation into one truck, and loaded the pallets of analog data tapes into the second truck. Cowing and Wingo then drove the trucks up to Mountain View, CA from Burbank, CA. The drives and tapes then sat in storage for the next year or so as funding for the project was sought.

Since the team required a facility with proper heating and cooling and a sink, available vacant buildings outside the gate at NASA Ames were whittled down to two: a barber shop, and a McDonald's

McDonald's

McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...

 that had closed weeks before. Since the barber shop was relatively small, using it would require that the tapes be stored at a remote warehouse. On the other hand, the McDonald's was much larger, had good lighting, adequate power and air conditioning and excellent parking. It turned out to need some improvements in the electrical wiring. By July 2008, the team had moved into the McDonald's, (Building 596), now dubbed "McMoon's".

Wingo and Cowing quickly found expertise in the person of Ken Zin, an Army veteran who has a lifetime of experience in working with analog tape machines, including the FR-900 series. By coincidence, Zin's brother worked at NASA Ames Research Center and it is via this coincidence that Wingo and Cowing initially got in touch with Zin. With the assistance of Ken Davidian at NASA Headquarters funding was eventually obtained in 2008 for a pilot project to show that the drives could be repaired and that an image could be recovered from the original tapes. The first task was to methodically disassemble and clean the tape drives. Meanwhile, Ken Zin began testing the systems of the disk drives and making lists of devices to replace and refurbish. Parts for the drives were bought on eBay, online electronic parts stores, and other places.

Marketing and recruiting allies

Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing plunged into the management of the project: ordering parts, managing funds, searching surplus yards for equipment, researching refurbishing companies, and recruiting allies to the project. He began sending out an email newsletter, which was later converted to a blog, MoonViews.com, and posting photos to the project's Facebook page. Student interns from nearby San Jose State University

San José State University

San Jose State University is a public university located in San Jose, California, United States...

 were recruited and the team requested help from retired employees of Ampex

Ampex

Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence...

 and from blog writers with audiences that might be able to help. Every day there seemed to be a new visitor to McMoon's, such as Dr. Lisa Gaddis from the USGS project to digitize the Lunar Orbiter film, and Charlie Byrne, who wrote the memo recommending the Lunar Orbiter data be stored on magnetic tape. The project was reported in the L.A. Times, ComputerWorld

Computerworld

Computerworld is an IT magazine that provides information for senior IT leaders. It is published in many countries around the world under the same or similar names. Its publisher is International Data Group. Computerworld serves the needs of IT management via print and online...

, National Geographic, the Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

, American Libraries

American Libraries

American Libraries is the official news and features magazine of the American Library Association. Published six times per year, along with four additional digital-only supplements, it is distributed to all members of the organization...

, the local news, and numerous blogs. Included in every news story was the message that the images are a vital piece of history, but more than this, they contain scientific data of a time and place and quality that has not been repeated. These are images that can assist in the current research about the Moon and the climate of the Earth. There may even be other lost data from the same era recorded using the same tape drives that could benefit from the efforts of the LOIRP team.

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

Mu-metal

Mu-metal is a nickel-iron alloy that is notable for its high magnetic permeability. The high permeability makes mu-metal very effective at screening static or low-frequency magnetic fields, which cannot be attenuated by other methods. The name came from the Greek letter mu which represents...

 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.

Hardware and funding

In a completed and working magnetic tape drive system, the tape-drive heads apply a very specific magnetic field to the tape; the tape then induces a change in electrical current, which is captured. The data from the Lunar Orbiter tapes is then run through a demodulator, and through an analog-to-digital converter so that it can be fed into a computer for digital processing. Each image is divided up into strips on the tape, so the computer is used to bring the strips together to create a whole image. Before even beginning the project, the team evaluated the risks and determined that there were two: one was that the tapes had deteriorated to the point where they could not be read; the second was that the tape drives would not be able to read the tapes. The milestones of the project were developed to test these risks as soon as possible with the least amount of money spent.

Once the project started in earnest in July 2008, results came quickly. In only a couple of weeks, the first tape drive had been powered up, although it was clear that many parts still needed to be replaced. Another week of cleaning and testing revealed that among the four drives and batches of spare parts there were enough good power supplies to run one of the tape drives, and there was at least one working head for the drive. The head is the mechanism that touches the tape and reads and writes data, so it is absolutely critical; in the case of the Ampex

Ampex

Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence...

 FR-900 tape drives, the heads were not manufactured after 1974, cannot be replaced, and can only be refurbished at great expense by a single small company.

After another month of repairing and replacing parts, testing and tuning mechanisms, the project got the first solid result that the tapes were good. Each tape starts with a short standard-format audio clip of the operator, and the tape drives were able to read the audio signal. (Hear a sample of the audio.) This does not use the video heads that are needed to read the Lunar Orbiter data off the tape, but this demonstrated that the tapes had not deteriorated and that many of the sub-systems of the tape drive were in good working order.

The documentation for the tape drives was substantially incomplete, which kept the team from understanding the right way to repair, maintain, and use the tape drives. The search for documentation has been extensive and usually disappointing, as it often turns out that retired or elderly engineers have just recently cleaned out their garages. Posting to a blog, Dennis Wingo said, "I cannot tell you how many times we have heard similar stories of recently tossed manuals over the last six months". At just the right moment the team heard from a friend of a friend that a mother lode of maintenance documentation stored on aperture card

Aperture card

An aperture card is a type of punched card with a cut-out window into which a chip of microfilm is mounted. Such a card is used for archiving or for making multiple inexpensive copies of a document for ease of distribution...

s (microfilm embedded in computer punch cards) had been saved by the retired head of Ampex

Ampex

Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence...

 field engineering. This documentation would make it possible for the team to understand the correct procedures for repairing the tape drives and aligning the mechanics.

At this point in the restoration, the demodulation of the tapes had become the biggest issue. The team was not sure if the demodulation board that came with the system was the correct one, if they needed a different one, or if they needed this one and another one. At the same time, they discovered a tape, which, from the audio clip at the start, sounded as if it contained a demodulated recording of one of the images. This was a lucky break, as it meant that a demodulator would not be needed to generate images from this tape. If the team could rescue this image, the project would prove "that the drive can be refurbished to the point of reliably playing a tape back". Work continued, and the team coined the term "technoarchealogy" to describe the process of researching which tape contained what image. Posts to the blog continued, but with little substance until suddenly NASA announced a press conference.

On November 13, 2008 NASA held a press conference and announced that they were releasing the first image that had been restored: a striking image, taken on August 23, 1966, of the Earth as viewed, for the very first time, from the Moon. This was a major milestone that showed that the tapes and the tape drives were both good. Preliminary analysis showed that the image had "four times the dynamic range of the ... film image and up to twice the ultimate resolution". The NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) had sponsored the team so far with a small grant of $100,000. With these results, more funds were released—another $150,000 to complete a major restoration of the drives and to create the demodulation hardware needed for the other tapes. Gregory Schmidt, deputy director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute at Ames said, "Now that we've demonstrated the capability to retrieve images, our goal is to complete the tape drives' restoration and move toward retrieving all of the images on the remaining tapes".

Within a month, the next round of funding came through and restoration began in earnest. The heads, capstan and rotor motors were being restored by two different companies. New documentation about the demodulation was discovered, and the team began building a board by hand. Custom belts were being manufactured to replace the old ones. Software was being written to process the digital images. The biggest expense was the heads, which cost around $8,000 each to be refurbished.

On March 21, 2009, the team announced that they had rescued an un-demodulated image from one of the tapes, using the newly perfected demodulation system. The image, of the crater Copernicus, is from the Lunar Orbiter 2 spacecraft taken on November 24, 1966. NASA Scientist Martin Swetnick was quoted in a Time magazine article from 1966, calling this image "one of the great pictures of the century".

By April, the team had digitized 30 images. A couple of months later an article in ComputerWorld revealed that the project had a new grant of $600,000, and had hopes to completely digitize all the images by February 2010. Most of the new funding came from NASA, but about 10% came from other donors. This new funding allowed the team to restore a second tape drive to full operation by November 2009, which made the process of restoring the images that much faster.

Future preservation

After each image is processed and restored, the data will be sent to the Planetary Data System

Planetary Data System

The Planetary Data System is a distributed data system that NASA uses to archive data collected by Solar System robotic missions and ground-based support data associated with those missions. PDS is managed by NASA Headquarters' Planetary Sciences Division. The PDS is an active archive that makes...

 (PDS), a digital repository for NASA mission and ground support data. The PDS was co-founded by Nancy Evans as a way to preserve and provide access to planetary datasets.

The FR-900 heads are being refurbished by Videomagnetics Inc. located in Colorado Springs Co. -- the only company in the world that still refurbishes Ampex and RCA Quadruplex video heads.

External links

• McMoon's at Ames Research Center: 37.4094°N 122.0548°W
• "NASA's early lunar images, in a new light" at LA Times, March 22, 2009
• "Repaired data drives restoring the Moon" at CollectSpace
  CollectSPACE
  collectSPACE is an online publication and community for space history enthusiasts featuring articles and photos about space artifacts and memorabilia, information on past, current, and upcoming space events, space history collecting resources, and links to other space-related websites...
  
  , November 14, 2008
• "Recoverng High Resolution Lunar Orbiter Images From Analog Tape", D. R. Wingo and K. L. Cowing, 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
  Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
  The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference , jointly sponsored by the Lunar and Planetary Institute and NASA Johnson Space Center , brings together international specialists in petrology, geochemistry, geophysics, geology and astronomy to present the latest results of research in planetary science...
  
  , 2009
• "Tape Recording of Lunar Orbiter Pictures", C. J. Byrne, July 6, 1965
• "Analysis of Lunar Orbiter Images Recovered from Analog Tape", D. R. Wingo and C.J. Byrne, 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
  Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
  The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference , jointly sponsored by the Lunar and Planetary Institute and NASA Johnson Space Center , brings together international specialists in petrology, geochemistry, geophysics, geology and astronomy to present the latest results of research in planetary science...
  
  , 2011
• "NASA unveils lunar image recovery project", CNet
• "NASA Scales Up 1966's Moon Image to Amazing Ultra-High Resolution", Gizmodo
• "The Earth As First Seen From The Moon", Editorial Photographer
• "The Moon View", editorial, New York Times
• "NASA restores 42-yr-old image of Earth rising above the lunar surface", Entertainment and Showbiz
• "Earthrise 1966", NASA Earth Observatory
• "NASA's early lunar images, in a new light", Los Angeles Times
• "Old NASA Tapes Reveal Stunning New Moon Images; Resolution Unparalleled", KTVU
• "House of Representatives Honors Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project"
• "La luna nel forno - La storia del progetto McMoon", Wittgenstein
• "The lost NASA tapes: Restoring lunar images after 40 years in the vault", Computerworld
• "MOON PICTURES: 1960s Orbiter Images Restored", National Geographic
• "Surface Restoration - Engineers restore high-resolution photos of the Moont", Technology Review
• "Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge", New Scientist
• "NASA Dives Into Its Past to Retrieve Vintage Satellite Data", Science
• "Die Mondschatz-Jäger", Der Spiegel
• "From Obsolete Technology, New Science", NOVA, PBS
• "Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project", Data Recovery Review Store
• "FR-900 Tape Drives and Lunar Orbiter Featured In Ampex Readout Newsletter April 1967", LOIRP