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NASA's original photos of the moon have been found in an abandoned McDonald's restaurant.
How? And how can they help now? I'm Cali Lewis. Welcome to Geek Beat!
Before we get into it, I'm excited to announce that John P and I will be doing the opening
keynote for the Future of Web Apps conference in London! That's right! You've been asking
us to get across the pond for years, and we're finally coming! Be sure to register for the
conference at futureofwebapps.com. And we'll have details on a viewer meetup soon! If you
know of any tech or just plain geeky stories we should get on video while we're there,
be sure to let me know!
Okay. NASA. The moon. McDonald's. Let's begin with a little history. In 1966,
NASA launched the first of five Lunar Orbiter satellites. Their purpose was to go on photo-mapping
missions around the moon. The race was on to land a man on the moon and NASA needed
the data to select a safe landing site.
Along the way, Orbiter's Kodak cameras captured some early iconic photos. Like... the first
view of the "whole earth" from space. You may recognize it. It became the cover shot
of the very first "Whole Earth Catalogue". They listed almost everything and anything
for sale on earth... clothing, tools, seeds... Anyway, the cameras also captured the first
earthrise from the point of view of the moon. These grainy black and white views were later
replaced by the iconic color "blue marble" earth views from the Apollo missions... which
owed their success to the Lunar Orbiter's mapping missions.
So...the Orbiter's photos were transmitted back to earth where they were transferred
to film for analysis. (Remember, this was the analog era).
The story might have ended there if not for engineer Charles Byrne - who convinced NASA
to record all the Orbiter data on Magnetic tapes, as well as NASA archivist Nancy Evans
- who not only saved the tapes, but also the machines they were recorded on by carting
them off to her garage when they were supposed to go to the scrap heap.
Which is exactly what YOU should be doing with YOUR precious files. Except in the digital
age. And with Carbonite Online Backup. If you have a business, I'm willing to bet you
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months if you buy. Can you imagine if the original photos of the moon were digitized
and all was lost just because they didn't keep offsite backups?
Okay... so fast forward to 2007 when some NASA contractors learn that 1,500 tapes and
the 600 pound refrigerator-sized Ampex FR-900 recorders still exist.
The tapes and the decrepit machines were re-united in a NASA building no one wanted: Building
596 - An abandoned McDonald's at Moffett Field near San Francisco. It's now nicknamed "McMoons."
One year later- thanks to parts purchased on eBay- the FR-900's were up & running and
reading data. And - thanks to better decoding software developed during the four decades
the tapes sat in storage, the Technoarcheologists of the "Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program",
which operated on a shoestring budget in an abandoned McDonald's restaurant, are producing
more maps and images of the moon that are more detailed than when the Lunar Orbiter
first visited the planet .
A neat story, but why should we care?
In 2009, NASA began mapping the moon again- digitally this time, and with satellites almost
five decades more advanced than the original Lunar Observers. We now may soon be able to
compare detailed maps of the moon -- made fifty years apart -- to understand more about
the moon, our Earth and our solar system. They can learn more about solar erosion or
meteor strikes. At the very least, it's fun just to compare how much more data we're able
to collect now, right?
So, take the NASA contractor who originally suggested the agency record the data, A NASA
archivist who stored the Ampex FR-900's in her garage for 4 decades against orders, plus
some present-day NASA contractors and employees who McGyvered the FR-900's back to life and
converted an abandoned burger joint into a working lab to recover the original survey
data... and you're left with one of the weirdest (and most wonderful) stories of the Space
Age we've found!
I'm Cali Lewis - thanks so much for joining us on another episode of GeekBeat.TV! I hope
you'll join us in the Google+ Geeks community, which is still growing at a rapid pace! Lots
of geeks hanging out together and helping each other out. Just think if the community
existed way back then. What could have been done to those spectacular images... I'm Cali
Lewis. To Infinity and beyond!