That's all kinds of awesome. I feel very silly for not even realising that the early missions had film cameras on board...
Fifty years ago, 5 unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon, taking extremely high resolution photos of the surface. They were trying to find the perfect landing site for the Apollo missions. They would be good enough to blow up to (12.19 x 16.46 m) images that the astronauts would walk across looking for the great spot. After their use, the images were locked away from the public until after the bulk of the moon landings, as at the time they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA’s spy satellite cameras, which the orbiters cameras were designed from...The best of the images can show the lunar surface at a resolution less than 1m, much better than any other orbiter that has been there.
The Lunar Orbiters never returned to Earth with the imagery. Instead, the Orbiter developed the 70mm film (yes film) and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/mm resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using lossless analog compression, which was yet to actually be patented by anyone. Three ground stations on earth, one of which was in Madrid, another in Australia and the other in California recieved the signals and recorded them. The transmissions were recorded on to magnetic tape. The tapes needed Ampex FR-900 drives to read them, a refrigerator sized device that cost $300,000 to buy new in the 1960’s.
Since 2007 the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has brought back 2000 images from 1500 analogue tapes. The first ever picture of an earthrise. As Keith Cowing said “an image taken a quarter of a fucking million miles away in 1966. The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken.” To find more of those images go to their website, but I warn you those images are huge.
http://www.worldofindie.co.uk/?p=682
I have a number of high-resolution prints (perhaps 15" x 15" each) on a wall. I don't think I've seen them anywhere else (not that I've particularly looked); I think a relative who worked on Apollo gave them to me. I should probably frame them to limit any environmental degradation, though at least they've never seen sunlight.
ReplyDeleteOh, and I used to eat at "McMoon" semi-regularly. I think there was a Baskin-Robbins not too far from it, too. Kind of a kick to see its new, better life (even if it's all over now).
Wow!
ReplyDeleteYup. Full on wet film labs to image, develop, and raster scan the print.
ReplyDeleteAll without a single IC or line of code.