Sorry, Maggie.  I really love your posts, but  I can’t help myself.  People make that mistake all the time and it never ceases to amuse me. 

The pre demodulated format preserves entirely the original quality of the data from the spacecraft.  The demodulator that we use takes the FM signal and demodulates that.  It is further demodulated from a “Vestigial Side Band” (VSB) format which can be considered to be an early form of analog compression.

This preserves the data in its original full dynamic range.  The degradation that we get today are from flaws in the analog tape that create transitory artifacts but do not effect the dynamic range or resolution of the images.

In our reproductions of the Apollo 14 landing site that we published we were honored when one of the flight controllers from that mission emailed us and said that if they had our images in front of them when the astronauts were looking for the crater that was their main mission objective, they would have found it.

Our images clearly showed a rock that the crew was standing on one side of when the crater was on the other side.  This was the major objective of the mission that was missed because they only had the images derived from film at that time.

We are quite proud of our work and it has been honored for its quality and for our work to save our legacy from the Apollo era.  The USGS also does great work and I have great admiration for the folks in Flagstaff.

There is no such thing as undegraded film, just as there is no such thing as undegraded tape.  I have been doing archival retrieval work since the mid 1980′s and one of my first jobs in this area was digitizing several million microfilm records from the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force.

I wrote original papers on the relative degradation of Silver Halide film vs the Diazo process.  I was a test engineer on the equipment that digitized thousands of aperture cards of microfilm per hour.

This project was DSREDS/EDCARS and was the first terabyte class document scanning project in history.

When NASA recorded the images on the 2″ video tape they recorded them in “pre demodulation” format.  This means that the analog scans of the 70mm film on the spacecraft were combined with the digital telemetry from the spacecraft and transmitted to the Earth.

On the Earth the images were written to the tape drives before they were demodulated and then the demodulated data was displayed on a kinescope that generated the 35mm film that you have at USGS.

The pre demodulated data on the tapes, we have recreated by using modern technology to demodulate the analog scans and telemetry data.  The analog data is digitized at 16 bits and 5 megasamples per second, approximately 10x  overscan from the original frequency domain of the analog image information, coupled with a 65,535 dynamic range, approximately a factor of 6,500 above the dynamic range of the original data.

This is possible due to the cheap cost of hard drives today.

We have shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that the images produced from our method has superior grey scale resolution than the best of the USGS film scans.  We work in a very collegial fashion with the folks at USGS and it is unfortunate that you take this belligerent and factually incorrect tact in  your responses to this article.

You can also argue that any increase in fidelity that might be possible from using the tapes is hardly worth the effort, given that the effort is by LOIRP’s own admission considerable and costly. The USGS effort is done, already paid for by taxpayers, and making a scientific contribution right now. In fact, one of my students was using the scans to look for changes in pyroclastic deposits until May. Fascinating work.

I have personally run over 50 hours worth of tapes in the past two weeks, the project is hardly stalled.

Hi, this is Dennis Wingo and I am the co-founder, along with Keith of the LOIRP project.  First of all, the USGS film is a parallel record that was made during the lunar orbiter missions.  The information that we have is on the original analog tapes from the three ground stations at Woomera, Madrid, and Goldstone.  

The original analog tapes from the ground stations that we have are different from the film that is at the USGS in Flagstaff Arizona.  The film was limited in dynamic range, having approximately 1-256 dynamic range for the grey scale.  This is because the 35mm film was taken from a kinescope.   Our analog tapes are from the direct broadcast from the spacecraft and represents the original scans of the 70 mm film on the spacecraft which had a dynamic range of 1-1000.

Our images, with four times the dynamic range of the film at the USGS has been shown to worldwide acclaim for the amazing increase in texture and details that our images bring out, well beyond what is possible from the film.  For more details on this you can down load the following document from the NASA Lunar Planetary Lab in Texas

Guide to Lunar Orbiter Photographs

As for Mr. Cowings participation, Keith has worked as an untiring volunteer on this project.  He maintains the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at 

http://www.moonviews.com

He works to publicize our project and he even put up the initial funds to move the tapes from NASA JPL to NASA Ames.  

Through this entire time, Keith has not received on dime in compensation from our project that is NASA funded.  I write each and every check and can verify that.

As for the reason why our story is popular?  It has great elements of history attached to it as being the first mission to the Moon.  It has a great person, in the form of Nancy Evans, who single handedly saved the tapes, and saved the tape drives from utter destruction.  None of our work would be possible today without her and Mark Nelson’s work in the late 1980′s.  

There was also the unlikely confluence of events of a random post in a blog that I saw and connected to my work with the Lunar Orbiter film in the 1980′s, our connections to Ames and the vision of its center director Dr. Pete Worden who supports these kinds of activities.  

There is also the story of the old men of the Apollo era like Ken Zin, Charlie Byrne, and Al Sturm, who through their lifelong experience, helped to resurrect the ability to read these tapes when the “experts” said it would take millions of dollars to do which we did at a fraction of the cost.

Then there are our students, who are doing original science on the images.

All of this is being done in an abandoned MacDonald’s on a former Navy base next to a dirigible hanger.

What is not to like about that?

Oh, by the way that is my sleeping bag in the picture, and yep I have slept there on occasion when we were working late.

The original photographs were not returned – the orbiters all were crashed into the surface of the moon.

So if somebody here has the original tapes, and somebody else has photographs, then it follows that the tapes are the originals and the photographs were produced from the data on the tapes.

This doesn’t preclude getting better images from the secondhand material, but assuming the same quality of processing, then the original data should be better.

It doesn’t matter if you use analog data tapes if they are degraded. It may sound impressive to some funding sources, but the fact is, this work has been done.