Scientists at NASA unviel 1500 reels of never-before-seen moon footage!

Two scientists working at NASA Ames in Mountain View California unviel a decades-old reel-to-reel tape machine allowing 1,500 video tapes, many of which having never been seen, to be studied and shared with the public!

Dennis Wingo, an engineering physicist who heads the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, and engineer Ken Zin, formerly of NSA, have unvieled the tapes from the 1960s stating these images are "almost 100 times better than the best Hubble can do"

The vid discusses future plans of moon exploration including "which craters to impact" for harvesting moon.

Climate data and pictures significant to climate change studies!

link to story
www.ktvu.com...

Link to images
www.lpi.usra.edu...

[edited to add link]



[edit on 16-4-2009 by notreallyalive]

"These tapes hold the best images of the moon ever taken, even to today,”

Wow even better than japans stuff? i thought those were going to be in high def.
These are better?

Not "never-before-seen".
The images have been seen before. They were all made into photographic prints when they were originally obtained from the Lunar Orbiters. Scans of the images are available (and have been for quite a while) here:
astrogeology.usgs.gov...
and here:
ser.sese.asu.edu...

What is now being done is the direct transfer from the analog tapes to a digital form.
www.moonviews.com...

The quality is not very much better than the scans.


[edit on 4/16/2009 by Phage]

reply to post by Phage


Although some of this data has been looked at and posted as you say, they clearly state much of it has never been seen. Imagine thousands of hours of "regular old moon data," I can imagine they never spent the 'man hours' to look it all over.

Also, the originally televised images were of significantly lower quality than what can be shown today.

Nice links however! thanks for the addition.

Why were they in the 'trash'? That part is a bit sketchy for me.
Why would they toss history in the trash like that? It doesn't make any sense.

reply to post by notreallyalive

There are not thousands of hours of video. These are photographs. The photographs (film) were taken by the Lunar Orbiters, processed on the Orbiters, scanned on the Orbiters, and transmitted to Earth. The images were transmitted as very high quality analog video. This is what is recorded on the tapes.

Each Orbiter had a limited amount of film: Mission I took 204 photos, Mission II took 211 photos, Mission III took 211 photos, Mission IV took 172 photos, Mission V took 211 photos. A total of 1009 photos. Not all that many. The photos were transmitted back to Earth as sections called "framelets". Out of a total of 3,166 of these framelets, 111 were not "read out" (scanned). Since they were not scanned, they could not be transmitted. All of the useable photos were printed.

Since the framelets which were not read out were not transmitted they are not contained on the video tapes which are being digitized.

You can read about the entire process of how the photos were made and transmitted here;
astrogeology.usgs.gov...

Are my eyes playing up, of have they put the film through the copier the wrong way round? All the craters look like hills

www.lpi.usra.edu...

I know they're craters, is it my eyes? (I'm tired, it could well be)

edit, this one looks fine to me
www.lpi.usra.edu...



[edit on 16/4/2009 by Acidtastic]

thanks phage the links are cool
now maybe we can get a better look at all the stuff we see with the smudge marks on those You tube videos.

reply to post by Acidtastic


Hey the first image you have has one of those "Face on Mars" things in it. Can you see it or am I making something out of nothing. Not that, that happens very much on this site. I mean , you can take most posts at face value. lol.

If there's ever anything that you want to hide from anyone, just give it to them mixed in with thousands of other pictures, documents, etc. That way, you can say that you've released them and won't be lying and they probably will never find the needle in the haystack!

Please excuse my stupidity when asking this question? Why is it that the moon is absolutly pitted with craters when the earth does not look like that?

Surely so many meteor, asteroid or whatever hits on the moon, makes it logical that through the ages the earth too should look like that?

To a layman it looks like the moon has come from elsewhere? What am I missing?

Respects

reply to post by captiva


The Earth has an atmosphere, water, rain, wind. The Earth has plate tectonics, and volcanoes. The Moon has none of these things. When a crater forms on the moon, it stays there. When a crater forms on the Earth, it gradually gets erased. The surface of the Moon has been around, with very little change, for longer than the surface of the Earth.

[edit on 4/16/2009 by Phage]

reply to post by captiva


I'm sure others with a whole lot more expertise will answer your question in more detail and probably better, but I would think that the earth would look like that if we didn't have water and vegetation covering most of it. Look at Australia from Google Earth, the landscape is severe.

[edit on 16/4/2009 by Iamonlyhuman]

Because Captiva, most of eath is overed by water..water over time erodes land features, just like san piled up on the beach, at the the highest watermark, the mound of sand will eventually be puled back out. Erath also goes through plate techtonics, continental drift, aka earthquakes.thats the plates under the continents movig and buckling.thosse too erase land features. SO do wind..imagine all 3 of these combined over thousands and millions of years! THe earths surface is constnatly chaning and changing.
On the moon, thier is no atmosphere or plate techtonics..so outside of occasial bursts of solar radiation...with the vaccum of sapce..the moon will be preserved till the sun dies.

reply to post by Phage


Thankyou, so, the earth has been hit as often as the moon, only the earth through many means reduces or removes the craters?. Am I right in thinking that the moon is still hit even now?, so why are there no signs of asteroids, meteors hitting earth on an ongoing basis?

Respects

Originally posted by captiva
Please excuse my stupidity when asking this question? Why is it that the moon is absolutly pitted with craters when the earth does not look like that?

Surely so many meteor, asteroid or whatever hits on the moon, makes it logical that through the ages the earth too should look like that?

To a layman it looks like the moon has come from elsewhere? What am I missing?

Respects

Tectonic activity/Erosion and general weathering , keep the face the Earth in constant flux . The moon takes a lot of hits for us .

Thanks everyone for your answers. I will now go do some research on the matter. Appreciated and my respects to you all.

reply to post by captiva


The large craters on the moon are very old. Most of them on the order of millions and billions of years. There is no indication that the Earth has been hit any more or less often than the Moon over that period of time.

Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by notreallyalive

 

There are not thousands of hours of video. These are photographs. The photographs (film) were taken by the Lunar Orbiters, processed on the Orbiters, scanned on the Orbiters, and transmitted to Earth. The images were transmitted as very high quality analog video. This is what is recorded on the tapes.

Each Orbiter had a limited amount of film: Mission I took 204 photos, Mission II took 211 photos, Mission III took 211 photos, Mission IV took 172 photos, Mission V took 211 photos. A total of 1009 photos. Not all that many. The photos were transmitted back to Earth as sections called "framelets". Out of a total of 3,166 of these framelets, 111 were not "read out" (scanned). Since they were not scanned, they could not be transmitted. All of the useable photos were printed.

Since the framelets which were not read out were not transmitted they are not contained on the video tapes which are being digitized.

You can read about the entire process of how the photos were made and transmitted here;
astrogeology.usgs.gov...

Thank you for getting the facts so I can distort them as I like

=)

star for you

Another point, besides all the brilliant previous posts, about the number of craters on the moon is that most meteors burn up in earth's atmosphere whereas on the moon they don't.

As a, off-topic side note: If you move the continents on earth together, as shown in the map of "Pangea" [see link], you can see an enormous hole where the Gulf of Mexico is. It's my understanding that many scientists believe this is where the meteor hit that caused the great ice age; this due to the Iridium they find when excavating from that historical time period.

bprc.osu.edu...