Rescuing NASA’s early lunar images
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.023173
They eventually came to the attention of Nancy Evans, a no-nonsense archivist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Evans was at her desk in the 1970s when a clerk walked into her office, asking what he should do with a truck-sized heap of data tapes that had been released from storage.
“What do you usually do with things like that?” she asked.
“We usually destroy them,” he replied.
“Do not destroy those tapes,” Evans commanded.
She talked her bosses at JPL into storing them in a lab warehouse. “I could not morally get rid of this stuff,” said Evans.
The full collection of Lunar Orbiter data, NASA’s first mission to successfully visit the Moon, amounted to 2,500 tapes. Assembled on pallets, they constituted an imposing monolith 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6 feet high.
There was an additional problem, the rare machines that could read the tapes, were each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton, and NASA didn’t have one.
More than forty years later, a group of volunteers working at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, have restored some of these early tape machines, and published the first of more than 2000 images from these early NASA missions (see above left).
Related Links
Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
