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Thursday, 10 December 2009 15:12

Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project Delivers the Moon

Written by Odyssey Moon
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Image: a portion of the set of Lunar Orbiter data tapes at McMoon's - an abandoned McDonalds onsite at NASA Ames Research Park, home of the LOIRP - Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. Image: a portion of the set of Lunar Orbiter data tapes at McMoon's - an abandoned McDonalds onsite at NASA Ames Research Park, home of the LOIRP - Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project.

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recover Project (LOIRP) is a remarkable effort to process lunar images recorded on old archival tapes during the NASA Lunar Orbiter missions that preceded Apollo. Unrelenting research, boot-strapping and creative engineering by project originators Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing has led to one of the most incredible “techno-archaeology” projects of our time.

Emerging from old NASA data tapes are high resolution images that exceed the quality of any available and rival the capabilities of even today’s high-tech lunar probes. The work occurs in an abandoned McDonalds building at the NASA Ames Research Park in Mountain View, California, resulting in the inevitable “McMoon's” nickname.

Odyssey Moon has been a proud participant in the LOIRP, providing some early funding together with many other dedicated project partners.  Odyssey Moon’s “First Intern Ever”, James Antifaev, completed the internship requirements of his International Space University Masters Degree by supporting the refurbishment of the 40 year old tape drives needed to recover the lunar images. The results coming from the LOIRP continue to be truly astounding.

“A Day in the Life of LOIRP” is a photo-tour of the McMoon's facility, the people, the tapes and the tape drives.

Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing will host a special live webcast from McMoon's, Thursday, December 10th at 1pm PT on USTREAM. See MoonToday.net for more details.

Visit MoonViews.com for updates on the LOIRP project.

 

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  • Comment Link Torrent Search Wednesday, 17 February 2010 12:36 posted by Torrent Search

    Let's see - we spent millions of dollars to send people and probes out into space, but we don't have the money set aside to develop a long-term solution for archiving, retrieving, sharing and examining this data as it comes in? It's not just the lunar missions - the Viking mission tapes were nearly lost because they threw out the 7-track tape reader needed to read the old reels. What other information have we lost while they dub around for another decade to replace the shuttle?

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