#Moon secrets revealed manuals#
The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. We just buy and reassemble these things bit by bit.” So we started buying used parts on eBay, Radioshack–I was sitting at a black tie reception at one point buying something on my iPhone. “These tapes were sealed for history by somebody who cared, and it was astonishing the condition they were in. “We’re both Apollo babies, so the moon to us was something that’s unfinished business,” says Cowing.
#Moon secrets revealed how to#
Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken.” This is an image taken a quarter of a fucking million miles away in 1966. We had resolution of the earth of about a kilometer. “It’s like having a DVD in 1966, you can’t play it. “We’re reaching back to a capability that existed but couldn’t be touched back when it was created,” says Keith Cowing, co-lead and founding member at LOIRP. Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it’s being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the ‘60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites.
You won’t get a burger there, though–its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who’ve rechristened the place McMoon’s.
Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald’s.
0 kommentar(er)
