One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...198328978.html

One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures
Richard Macey
August 5, 2006

THE heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first
tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th
century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes
that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three
tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone
missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate
to dust before they can be found.

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from
the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry
version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.

Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Sarkissian, a
CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We are working on
the assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told the Herald.

"Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."

Mr Sarkissian began researching the role of Parkes in Apollo 11's
mission in 1997, before the movie The Dish was made. However, when he
later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the tapes, they could not
be found.

"People may have thought 'we have tapes of the moon walk, we don't
need these'," said the scientist who hopes a new, intensive hunt will
locate them.

If they can be found, he proposes making digitalised copies to treat
the world to a very different view of history.

But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment
on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard
centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are
found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.

"We want the public to see it the way the moon walk was meant to be
seen," Mr Sarkissian said.

"There will only ever be one first moon walk."

Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US
National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of
space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.

"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows
exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.

Many people involved had retired or died.

Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of the
other five Apollo moon landings. The format used by the original
pictures beamed from the moon was not compatible with commercial
technology used by television networks. So the images received at
Parkes, and at tracking stations near Canberra and in California, were
played on screens mounted in front of conventional television cameras.

"The quality of what you saw on TV at home was substantially degraded"
in the process, Mr Sarkissian said, creating the ghostly images of
Armstrong and Aldrin that strained the eyes of hundreds of millions of
people watching around the world.

Even Polaroid photographs of the screen that showed the original
images received by Parkes are significantly sharper than what the
public saw. While the technique looks primitive today, Mr Sarkissian
said it was the best solution that 1969 technology offered.

Among the few who saw the original high-quality broadcast was David
Cooke, a Parkes control room engineer in 1969.

"I can still see the screen," Mr Cook, 74, said. "I was amazed, the
quality was fairly good."

On Sat, 05 Aug 2006 08:12:22 -0500, collins wrote:

"Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."

My guess is they're somewhere in Israel. Those thieves
smuggle anything from female teens to rocket designs
into Israel for profit.

--

"za'farun ke ziyAd shod be khorde khar midan"

"Star Master" ] wrote in message
...

It's a proven fact NASA's six allegedly-manned half-million
miles per round-trip(!) missions to the Moon (1969-72) were
at best unmanned flights in competition with the U.S.S.R.'s
contemporaneous Soviet Luna/Lunakhod unmanned Moon missions.

"They couldn't make it so they faked it."

I bet you voted republican too.
Stupid is as stupid does.

Ok... proven fact... Why don't you give me a videotape... NO WAIT!
it'll probably be *fabricated* as you say everything is...
Now tell me if this is possible:
---26 miles, marathon very athletic-----
---25 miles--------------------
---24 miles--------------------
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
---13 miles, half marathon, possible, but hard to work up to---
---12 miles--------------------
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
---5 miles, trained cross country---
---4 miles, cross country---
---3 miles, cross country, long distance track---
---2 miles, track---
---1 mile, school requirement, most everyone---

Now tell me that the videos in the olympics are fabricated because they
do 26 times what a group of children can do! There are extremes in
EVERYTHING!!! Obviously it looked cheesy to you because you are blinded
to think all blurry images not as good as my new HDTV have a great
chance of being fabricated to you! Now tell me, straight up, how we
could send probes to Mars but not men to the moon. Say cosmic waves,
say human health, well guess what, you're wrong and you have the group
of sane physicists and engineers against you, congrats...

bucky wrote:
"Star Master" ] wrote in message
...

It's a proven fact NASA's six allegedly-manned half-million
miles per round-trip(!) missions to the Moon (1969-72) were
at best unmanned flights in competition with the U.S.S.R.'s
contemporaneous Soviet Luna/Lunakhod unmanned Moon missions.

"They couldn't make it so they faked it."

I bet you voted republican too.
Stupid is as stupid does.

Min vote? Are you kidding? He's too stupid to even understand how a
lever works, let alone use one.