Wicked! New pictures of the Apollo landing sites

[Pazuzu]

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html

It's been far too long since we took a picture of the landers...decades too long.

[WolfeMacleod]

You'd think that with all the fancy teescopes and stuff we have, they'd be able to take a picture that't more than a blurry dot.
C'mon. I want to see the treadmarks in the footprints! Or at least a shape....

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by WolfeMacleod

You'd think that with all the fancy teescopes and stuff we have, they'd be able to take a picture that't more than a blurry dot.
C'mon. I want to see the treadmarks in the footprints! Or at least a shape....

You have to remember that the moon is 250,000 miles away. The lander is only a couple of yards wide. The moon is zooming along at a good clip. Try to keep a telescope aimed at a mile wide crater and you will see how difficult that is. Then you add in all of the atmosphere of earth and the moon is never just directly overhead. You are looking thru a lot more air since the moon is at an angle.

[slodave]

The pix were not taken from earth. The pix in the link are from the LRO that is not quite in its final orbit around the moon yet. NASA says that they'll have some better soon.

[kycarguy 935]

It was reported on the news yesterday that some of the original footage may have been erased by accident in the 70's. Most of the good stuff was probably saved by the networks so they will be working on that.

[cl8ton]

This shot sez it all...
What kinda of material are you made of...Buzz on the moon



A real American hero...
Too bad he went stealth upon landing. Was he even drinking age when he landed on the moon?



Yesterday, his last check written before the moon launch went for many $K at auction...

[bell]

Come on........we all know the lunar landing was filmed in a basement.....
Now where is my tinfoil hat

[mike55]

A real American hero...
Too bad he went stealth upon landing. Was he even drinking age when he landed on the moon?

He was 38 when he landed on the moon. Those pics are interesting. Looks like Apollo 16 came close to landing in a big crater......

[gt350mike]

Originally Posted by kycarguy 935

It was reported on the news yesterday that some of the original footage may have been erased by accident in the 70's.

I wonder if the guy kept his job after that???????

[kycarguy 935]

Originally Posted by gt350mike

I wonder if the guy kept his job after that???????

I hope not. Bozo move for sure.

[kycarguy 935]

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Thu Jul 16, 7:11 pm ET

WASHINGTON – NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.

In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.

But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.

The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.

"There's nothing being created; there's nothing being manufactured," said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who is in charge of the project. "You can now see the detail that's coming out."

The first batch of restored footage was released just in time for the 40th anniversary of the "one giant leap for mankind," and some of the details seem new because of their sharpness. Originally, astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Earth's first moonwalker shows the visor and a reflection in it.

The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a monthslong project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done. But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder; Buzz Aldrin following him; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; and the planting of the flag on the lunar surface.

Nafzger said a huge search that began three years ago for the old moon tapes led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. His report on that will come out in a few weeks.

The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

How did NASA end up looking like a bumbling husband taping over his wedding video with the Super Bowl?

Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.

Outside historians were aghast.

"It's surprising to me that NASA didn't have the common sense to save perhaps the most important historical footage of the 20th century," said Rice University historian and author Douglas Brinkley. He noted that NASA saved all sorts of data and artifacts from Apollo 11, and it is "mind-boggling that the tapes just disappeared."

The remastered copies may look good, but "when dealing with historical film footage, you always want the original to study," Brinkley said.

Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, said the loss of the original video "doesn't surprise me that much."

"It was a mistake, no doubt about that," Launius said. "This is a problem inside the entire federal government. ... They don't think that preservation is all that important."

Launius said federal warehouses where historical artifacts are saved are "kind of like the last scene of `Raiders of the Lost Ark.' It just goes away in this place with other big boxes."

The company that restored all the Indiana Jones movies, including "Raiders," is the one bailing out NASA.

Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., noted that "Casablanca" had a pixel count 10 times higher than the moon video, meaning the Apollo 11 footage was fuzzier than that vintage movie and more of a challenge in one sense.

Of all the video the company has dealt with, "this is by far and away the lowest quality," said Lowry president Mike Inchalik.

Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video. Historian Launius wasn't as blown away.

"It's certainly a little better than the original," Launius said. "It's not a lot better."

The Apollo 11 video remains in black and white. Inchalik said he would never consider colorizing it, as has been done to black-and-white classic films. And the moon is mostly gray anyway.

The restoration used four video sources: CBS News originals; kinescopes from the National Archives; a video from Australia that received the transmission of the original moon video; and camera shots of a TV monitor.

Both Nafzger and Inchalik acknowledged that digitally remastering the video could further encourage conspiracy theorists who believe NASA faked the entire moon landing on a Hollywood set. But they said they enhanced the video as conservatively as possible.

Besides, Inchalik said that if there had been a conspiracy to fake a moon landing, NASA surely would have created higher-quality film.

Back in 1969, nearly 40 percent of the picture quality was lost converting from one video format used on the moon — called slow scan — to something that could be played on TVs on Earth, Nafzger said.

NASA did not lose other Apollo missions' videos because they weren't stored on the type of tape that needed to be reused, Nafzger said.

As part of the moon landing's 40th anniversary, the space agency has been trotting out archival material. NASA has a Web site with audio from private conversations in the lunar module and command capsule. The agency is also webcasting radio from Apollo 11 as if the mission were taking place today.

The video restoration project did not involve improving the sound. Inchalik said he listened to Armstrong's famous first words from the surface of the moon, trying to hear if he said "one small step for man" or "one small step for A man," but couldn't tell.

Through a letter read at a news conference Thursday, Armstrong had the last word about the video from the moon: "I was just amazed that there was any picture at all."

[cl8ton]

This is the most awesome vids of Apollo 11... the docking of the Lunar Module to the orbiting Command Module!
Skip to the 2min mark to see orbital physics in action! After the departure from the moon surface.

[URY914]

[kycarguy 935]

HAHA OJ was in that one.

[fingpilot]

In fact, as I remember, after the Learjet off airport landing, as the remaining supplies are divided between the three astronauts, each got a rocket flare, and some sort of weapon.

OJ got the knife.

[Zeke]

Those guys were the bravest sons of guns ever.

[fingpilot]

You have to remember that the astronauts had watched all the test firings of both the S-IV-B and the F-1 main engines. And those did not always go well.

I had an uncle, (recently passed) who was the main turbopump engineer for the F-1. He said every time he would successfully get an engine to run at 100% for the required 150 seconds.... yes seconds (design life), he would get a call from Rocketdyne and ask if 103% was possible. Then 105% and so on. Something like every per cent above 100 was a order of magnitude power level increase. Of course, they blew up on the test stand, and they went back to work strengthening the part that broke until something else gave up.

I wish I had gotten Uncle Karl (Krebs) to write down all of his stories. He is mentioned in any record of liquid fuel propulsion, including the restartable and throttleable Shuttle system. He was awarded just about every science award for aerospace there was. I miss him a lot. And for KevinP73? He was a Corvair nut, had several Spyder convertibles.

Anyone that lived in the SoCal deserts in the 60's and 70's remembers the nightime firings and explosions. They did it at night because it was easier to track the pieces as they exploded for analysis later.

And they found guys with 'junk' big enough to climb aboard the top of this pile of explosive potential and ride it into the vacuum and void of space.

[m21sniper]

Appolo 11 is still to this day man's crowning achievment, it's zenith.

[carnutzzz]

Why are the shadows pointed in the opposite direction of all of the boulders around them?

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by kycarguy 935

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Thu Jul 16, 7:11 pm ET

WASHINGTON – NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.

In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.

Is that the story from 2006 that they lost the tapes?

Because they turned up in Perth:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/29/moon_landing_tapes/