Amazing, historic stuff. But all of these old media formats are fragile, and preservation can be a long and tedious process.

Cowing and Wingo funded the archival effort themselves in the beginning, then secured some funding from NASA. But the NASA funding was modest, and has run out; the guys have been funding the project themselves, and they don't have the resources they need. They have exceeded the requirements of NASA’s funding, but just haven't been able to retrieve and digitally archive all of these irreplaceable historic space images—yet.

So they're crowdsourcing funds on RocketHub. They've raised about 1/3 of their goal at the time of this blog post, and they have only 5 days left.

Miles O'Brien did a "This week in Space" webshow episode about the project back in 2010; check it out above.

Below, more on the project from Cowing, who is also the guy behind NASAwatch.

The LOIRP team managed to obtain original tape drives from the 1960s (covered in dust in a farmer’s barn) and a full set of original Lunar Orbiter analog data tapes (threatened with erasure) containing all images sent back to Earth by the five spacecraft between 1966-67.

None of this had been functional or usable since the late 1960s.

From the onset the project has been run on a shoestring budget. The LOIRP effort is housed in an abandoned McDonalds burger joint at Moffett Field, California (also known as "McMoons").

The LOIRP folks used spare parts bought on eBay, discarded government equipment, new hardware reverse-engineered from math equations in 50 year old documentation, modern laptops, the expertise of retired engineers and scientists, and the dedication of young students.

Think of this as “Antique Roadshow” meets “The Right Stuff” in an Apple Store. They’ve also called this activity “technoarchaeology” and “dumpster diving for science”. A pirate flag has been displayed in the front window since they started.

With this unlikely assembly of people, hardware, and hacking they have been able to retrieve Lunar Orbiter images with far more resolution and dynamic range than was possible in the 1960s. Indeed, many of the images they have retrieved equal or exceed what the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is sending back from the Moon today. Taken together, this Lunar Orbiter imagery combined with LRO data, provides a time machine of sorts with which researchers can look at recent lunar history.

After five years the LOIRP team has optimized their hardware, software, and procedures so as to achieve an efficiency far greater than they initially possessed. In addition to capturing the remaining images, they still need to generate a formal submission of all images to NASA’s Planetary Data System.

Three weeks ago we began a crowd funding effort on RocketHub at http://www.rockethub.com/projects/14882-lunar-orbiter-image-recovery-project You will note that among the things we offer to supporters are rare photographs donated to the LOIRP by original Lunar Orbiter program participants specifically for the purpose of fundraising.

The fact that we have managed to pull all of this together still surprises us. Many people told us that this was impossible. However, if we stop this project, it is unlikely that this capability can ever be re-created.

UPDATE: From project co-lead Dennis Wingo:

I would like to thank all the boingboing folks who have so generously donated to our project.

We call what we are doing technoarcheology because we are literally digging up our technical past to restore it. It is said that only 1% of the literary works of the Greek and Roman civilizations have made it to us today. I would estimate that out of that 1% only 1% of the engineering and science works have made it to us today.

The Greeks were masterful mechanical engineers and the Romans were unsurpassed Civil Engineers. Just think if we had not lost that legacy.

This is what our project is all about, preserving the technical legacy of the American technical civilization.

Last week, I asked BoingBoing readers to send me images and stories about your favorite museum exhibits—beloved displays and collections squirreled away in museums that might not have a big profile outside your state or region. The challenge was triggered by an awesome photo of a mummified Ice Age bison on display in Fairbanks, Alaska.

But this series also has roots in my own love of the museum exhibits that defined my childhood. Over the coming week, I'll be posting more "My Favorite Museum Exhibit" entries. I'll update the list here, and this post will be the one-stop place to check if you want to read them all. But I also wanted to use this space to share one of my favorite museum exhibits—the Panorama of North American Plants and Animals at the University of Kansas' Dyche Museum of Natural History.

Taxidermy is not normally my thing. I love dinosaur bones, but dioramas always make me feel like I'd rather just be at a zoo, or watching a nature special on TV. This is especially true of the "local flora and fauna" sort of museum dioramas. I have seen squirrels, thanks. But the Panorama is something else, a work that transcends its genre to become true art and a temple to Maker creativity.

The Panorama is the work of Lewis Lindsay Dyche, a 19-century KU professor. Dyche originally constructed the exhibit for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. It featured 121 animals and took two years to complete. Scientific American called the Panorama one of the most remarkable exhibits at the Fair. By all accounts, Dyche was a very good taxidermist. But his taxidermy work is only part of what makes the Panorama so impressive.

Instead of presenting a single scene, the Panorama flows, capturing every North American biome from the Arctic to the jungle. It wraps around the room, almost a full 360 degrees. As you follow the circle, polar bears and seals fade seamlessly into bunnies on the tundra, then aspen forests full of bobcats, and on into craggy cliffs dotted with mountain goats. As a child, it was my first brush with the realization that where I lived was only one part of something bigger—if I walked far enough north, I'd find icy wastes, far enough south and there'd be vine-covered trees filled with monkeys. What the Panorama offered was perspective. Before you're old enough to really comprehend "spaceship Earth" you can comprehend this.

The video at the top of this post only shows about 2/3 of the Panorama. You're missing the desert and jungle areas. Below, you can see a close up that shows off the prairie and Rocky Mountain areas in a little more detail.

According to Jennifer Humphrey, the KU Natural History Museum's communications director, the Panorama is one of only three dioramas like it in the whole world. It's not the only thing I love at that Museum. But it's definitely a big part of what makes the Museum unique.

*************

Other entries in the "My Favorite Museum Exhibit" series:

As I've mentioned before, one of the best parts of digging around the Toronto Archives is the stuff you find that you were never looking for. I'd guess that at least a third of the ideas I've had for historical posts about the city have come via some serendipitous discovery or another. Today's installment is certainly fits this bill.

When I was putting together a post about what banks used to look like in Toronto, I happened to stumble upon some spectacular, Kubrick-esque shots of an unidentified computer room that got me wondering if there were any more like them in the City's digitized collection. As it turns out, there are — though not as many as I'd like.

Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media. The events of September 11th, 2001 affected the entire world. (Thanks, Rick!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/25/internet-archives-cache-of-247-tv-footage-from-911-and-beyond.html/feed 41