Missing Lunar Orbiter Tapes Found In an Abandoned McDonalds


Pirate McDonalds

Photo Credit: Steve Jurvetson

We discovered a most unusual covert operation in a McDonald's today… What could it be? - Steve

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Bingo Rocketeer for spotting mission tapes and jerryfi_99 for guessing that imagery data would take this much space.

The Pirate flag is purely motivational, methinks, for a skunkworks improvising what was thought to be impossible.

Forty years ago, unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon taking extremely high-res photos of the surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward... In this McDonalds, the only copy of that data is about to be resurrected. Erik and I dropped in for a visit after the LUNAR rocket launch at NASA Ames.

And gosh, Alieness may be right too when they look at those images carefully for three-toe footprints...

They have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified because they would reveal the extreme precision of our spy satellites. Instead, all we have ever seen are the grainy photo of a photo images that were released to the public.

The spacecraft did not ship this film back to Earth. Instead, they developed the film on the Lunar Orbiter and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/millimeter resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using yet-to-be-patented-by-others lossless analog compression. Three ground stations on Earth (one was in Madrid) recorded the transmissions on these magnetic tapes.

Recovering the data has proven to be very difficult, requiring technological archeology. The only working version of the Ampex tape player ($300K when new) was discovered in a chicken coop and restored with the help of the original designer. There is only one person on Earth who still refurbishes these tape heads, and he is retiring this year. The skills to read this data archive are on the cusp of disappearing forever.

Some of the applications of this project, beyond accessing the best images of the moon ever taken, are to look for new landing sites for the new Google Lunar X-Prize landers, and to compare the new craters on the moon from 40 years ago, a measure of micrometeorite flux and risk to future lunar operations.

And yes, the conspiracy continues, with McDonalds' long and sordid history with the Apollo program...

Behind the counter of an abandoned McDonalds lie 48,000 lbs of 70mm tape… the only copy of extremely high-resolution images of the moon.

These tapes were recorded 40 years ago as part of the Apollo program to map the lunar surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward. They have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified as they reveal the extreme precision of our spy satellites. Instead, all we have ever seen are the grainy photo-of-a-photo images that were released to the public.

The spacecraft did not ship this film back to Earth. Instead, they developed the film on the Lunar Orbiter and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/millimeter resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using yet-to-be-patented-by-others lossless analog compression. Three ground stations on Earth (one was in Madrid) recorded the transmissions on these magnetic tapes.

Recovering the data has proven to be very difficult, requiring technological archeology. The only working version of the Ampex tape player ($300K when new) was discovered in a chicken coop and restored with the help of the original designer. There is only one person on Earth who still refurbishes these tape heads, and he is retiring this year. The skills to read this data archive are on the cusp of disappearing forever.

Some of the applications of this project, beyond accessing the best images of the moon ever taken, are to look for new landing sites for the new Google Lunar X-Prize robo-landers, and to compare the new craters on the moon today to 40 years ago, a measure of micrometeorite flux and risk to future lunar operations.

Here is never before seen high resolution image from the pre-Apollo lunar mapping project. This film was created from one of thousands of 1960’s lunar orbiter data files. Only a few of these files were converted into create high resolution maps to help map high potential landing sites for the Apollo missions. Only a very limited number of the files were fully developed due to the time it took for early computes to process. The result is there are tons of data that has never been seen or developed. In addition, the high resolution images have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified revealing the extreme precision of our spy satellites). Instead, all we have ever seen are the grainy photo-of-a-photo images that were released to the public. Hummm...exactly what I you are seeing here… as I took a photo of the film that our host was holding up to the light.