Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
The highest-resolution photographs of the lunar surface taken in the 1960s were stored on analog tape drives in a format that almost no one could read anymore. The Lunar Orbiter program, which photographed potential Apollo landing sites between 1966 and 1967, had recorded its images on 70mm film developed onboard the spacecraft, then scanned and transmitted to Earth as analog signals. Those signals were captured on magnetic tape at ground stations. By the 2000s, the original Ampex FR-900 tape drives capable of reading this data were museum pieces -- retired military hardware from the Vietnam era. Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing set out to recover the images anyway, launching the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project from a building on the edge of NASA's Ames Research Center that had previously been a McDonald's.
Saving the Moon from Decay
The Lunar Orbiter missions were a critical precursor to Apollo, providing detailed photographs of the lunar surface that helped NASA select safe landing sites. Five spacecraft orbited the Moon between 1966 and 1967, collectively photographing 99 percent of the surface. The images were remarkable for their resolution, but in the 1960s they could only be printed using technology that degraded the quality significantly. The original analog tapes contained far more detail than had ever been extracted. By the 2000s, those tapes were deteriorating -- magnetic media has a finite lifespan, and the clock was running out on some of the most scientifically valuable data from the early space program.
Drives from the Scrap Heap
Wingo and Cowing located decommissioned Ampex FR-900 tape drives, massive reel-to-reel machines originally built for the military, and painstakingly restored them to working condition. The project operated from a repurposed building at NASA Ames in Mountain View -- the former McDonald's, which still had the tile floor. With funding from NASA and private sources, the team digitized the analog tapes at resolutions that exceeded anything produced from the original data in the 1960s. The resulting images revealed details of the lunar surface -- craters, ridges, boulder fields -- with a clarity that stunned planetary scientists. Features barely visible in the original prints leaped out of the newly digitized scans.
Archaeology of the Space Age
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project is a case study in what might be called space-age archaeology: recovering scientific knowledge that was captured but never fully extracted because the technology to read it properly did not yet exist. The project demonstrated that data from the earliest years of space exploration still holds scientific value -- if someone takes the trouble to build the machines to read it. The recovered images have been used in modern lunar science, supporting missions decades after they were first captured from orbit. That this work happened in a converted fast-food restaurant on the edge of a NASA research center, carried out largely by volunteers, adds an appropriately scrappy coda to the story of the American space program.
From the Air
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project operated at NASA Ames Research Center at 37.41°N, 122.06°W in Mountain View. The massive Ames campus with its distinctive wind tunnels and hangars is one of the most visible landmarks on the south Bay. Nearby airports: Moffett Federal Airfield (KNUQ), San Jose (KSJC). Best viewed at 2,000-4,000 ft AGL.