Apollo 11 tapes lost

Blob · #1 (**permalink**) 14-July-2006, 02:37 PM

Doh!
John Sarkissian of Parkes Observatory, Australia has reported that the recordings of the first TV pictures of Apollo eleven's landing on the moon have gone missing.

700 boxes of high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes were kept at the U.S. National Archives. The good news is that they still have two boxes...

The Parkes radio telescope, with a dish of 64 metres in diameter, is one of the biggest in the southern hemisphere. It was completed in 1961 and has operated almost continuously to the present day.
The movie "The Dish" starring Sam Neill was based on the Parkes telescope's key role in the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Position: Latitude = 32° 59' 59.866" south, longitude = 148° 15' 44.359" east, elevation = 392 m.

Read more (PDF)

MG1962A · #2 (**permalink**) 14-July-2006, 02:59 PM

Quote:

The movie "The Dish" starring Sam Neill was based on the Parkes telescope's key role in the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Thats an extremely loose description, but I will take it...Great film

Blob · #3 (**permalink**) 14-July-2006, 04:19 PM

Hum,

Quote:

A Scientist is trying to track down a series of high quality magnetic tapes that record the Apollo 11 extra vehicular adventure (EVA) on the Moon before it is too late and they disappear forever.

Ozzy · #4 (**permalink**) 15-July-2006, 02:42 PM

Its interesting that digital recording is promoted as the safest long term storage medium. I have CD's that are starting to deteriorate, yet my grandma has records from the 1920's that are still playable.

Do you know what the resolution of the images is?

I wonder what happened to the other 698 tapes? Collectors items? Its a disgrace for the U.S. National archives. Isn't storing and protecting archival material one of their primary function?

upinthesky · #5 (**permalink**) 25-July-2006, 09:49 PM

Check out NPR Wednesday, July 26, Morning Edition. Doing a piece on the missing tapes.

ToSeek · #6 (**permalink**) 25-July-2006, 09:52 PM

Thread moved from "General Science" to "Space Exploration."

ToSeek · #7 (**permalink**) 24-August-2006, 04:36 PM

Search For Apollo 11 TV Tapes Moves Into High Gear

Quote:

The hunt for magnetic tapes that recorded the original Apollo 11 moonwalks of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 has swung into high gear.

A full-scale look for the original tapes is now underway at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland—the site where the material may be housed, or at another location within the NASA archiving system.

Despite the challenges of the search, the space agency maintains it does not consider the tapes to be lost.

For the past 18 months or so, NASA Goddard had been carrying out a casual look for the tapes—replaced recently by a more formal look-see.

NASA engineers are hopeful that when—and if—the moonwalk tapes are unearthed, they can use today’s digital technology to provide a version of the moonwalk that is much better quality than what was broadcast throughout the world over 37 years ago.

Bolstering that belief is the fact that Goddard engineers were able to extract data from a nearly-identical type of tape recorded in 1969 of an Apollo simulation from the Honeysuckle Creek, Australia tracking station. That provides optimism that when the tapes are located, experienced tape handlers can preserve original video.

Dolly Perkins, who's been put in charge of the search, used to be in my branch. She's very ambitious.

ToSeek · #8 (**permalink**) 24-August-2006, 05:07 PM

One small step in hunt for moon film world didn't see

Quote:

A reel of film held for 20 years in a Sydney vault could unlock the mystery of what happened to the original tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The reel belongs to Australian film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton, who had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimetre film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue.

Mr Clifton had ordered the reel in 1979 for a rock film he was making about Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon but forgot he had it until seeing a news report on television recently.

The footage of Neil Armstrong's "one small step" is considered among the most important artefacts of the 20th century but the original NASA tapes have been mislaid somewhere in the US.

It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist.

Blob · #9 (**permalink**) 24-August-2006, 05:28 PM

German astronomers revealed on Monday that they possess one of the world's rarest videotape collections: original images of the Apollo moon landings that have been lost by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).
Broadcast images of the day, which still exist in archives, were made by filming Nasa video screens.

"We are one of the few places in the world with the raw images, not copies of copies, but direct signals from the Moon. We have got pictures from Apollo 15 and the missions after that" - Thilo Elsner, director of the Bochum Observatory.

However his agency had no video, only sound, of the historic first mission, Apollo 11. Elsner said the signals could only be picked up by Bochum's 20m antenna when the moon was visible from Germany.
He said the collection of between 100 and 150 reels of two-inch magnetic tape would be useful, if Nasa also lacked originals from that later period.

ToSeek · #10 (**permalink**) 24-August-2006, 06:51 PM

Whether they find the tapes they're looking for or not, it seems that other people are being inspired to find similar items of interest.

Blob · #11 (**permalink**) 27-August-2006, 12:17 AM

Quote:

Hopes an Australian filmmaker might have found a clue to the mystery of NASA's missing Apollo 11 moon-mission tapes have been dashed.
CSIRO Parkes Observatory operations scientist John Sarkissian said the tapes left in a Sydney vault 20 years ago were a compilation of Gemini and Apollo mission footage released as promotional material by NASA in the 1970s and accompanying documentation would not throw light on the mystery.

Nicolas · #14 (**permalink**) 01-November-2006, 12:41 PM

So they haven't found the lost tapes yet, but they found other lost tapes?

btw 28 cm tapes, isn't 26 cm the standard large reel size?

badprof · #15 (**permalink**) 01-November-2006, 06:14 PM

Dang it!!! I have sat in those seats many times!!!!!

"O'Brien was unavailable for comment."

Being an Aussie, I can imagine what his first comment would have been!!!

PhantomWolf · #16 (**permalink**) 02-November-2006, 12:13 AM

Being an Aussie, I can imagine what his first comment would have been!!!

I'd probably go with "Bigger!"

ToSeek · #17 (**permalink**) 31-January-2007, 03:58 PM

Washington Post feature article (registration required but free):

NASA Is Stumped in Search For Videos of 1969 Moonwalk

Quote:

About 36 years after the tapes went into storage, NASA was suddenly eager to have them. There was just one problem: The tapes were nowhere to be found.

What started as an informal search became an official hunt through archives, record centers and storage rooms throughout NASA facilities. Many months later, disappointed officials now report that the trail they followed has gone cold. Although the search continues, they acknowledge that the videos may be lost forever.

wwonka · #18 (**permalink**) 13-October-2008, 09:54 AM

Hi, folks, long time no see.

Just wondering - has anyone got any more on this? I've just been looking at the Peter Clifton thing - there seems to be nothing more on it, nor can I find the Pink Floyd video that it might be on.. (O:

I might try contacting Mr Clifton or his company, - I'd love to see better images. I can remember as a boy watching it with incredible excitement, but tinged with disappointment when I saw how poor the picture was... I find it a little strange that the attempt to find original video of one of the (if not the) most momentous occasions in history has simply fizzled out like this.

ww, formerly yfh on glp.. (did that make sense to anyone..?)

joema · #19 (**permalink**) 13-October-2008, 03:15 PM

An extensive voice interview with Stan Lebar, program manager for the Apollo TV lunar camera: http://apollotalks.com/index.php?post_id=312074

Some key points:

The Apollo TV camera was severely bandwidth constrained. NASA only allocated 500Khz, which had to fit within the available telemetry band.

This necessitated a camera with 10 frames /sec and 320 lines resolution. By contrast a commercial NTSC camera has 4Mhz video bandwidth, using 30 frames/sec at 525 lines.

A converter at EACH tracking site changed the 10 frames/sec @ 320 lines to 30 frames/sec @ 525 lines for transmission to Houston, and then to the commercial networks.

What Houston and the public saw was the converted signal, not the original signal. The significance?

The method for format conversion was very primitive, and resulted in significant loss of quality. It consisted of displaying the original video on a monitor with slow phosphor persistence, then having a conventional camera trained on the monitor. The output of that camera went to Houston, then to the commercial networks.

This resulted in the familiar noisy, ghostly, low-contrast footage. By contrast the original video seen by personnel at each tracking site was considerably better and sharper. It didn't have the ghostly, "smudging" effect. Both contrast and resolution were much better.

The original video signal was recorded at each tracking site. In the interview, I don't recollect if Stan Lebar commented on the disposition of those tapes.

However in theory if THOSE tapes were digitally processed and converted using modern techniques, the resultant output would be vastly superior to what anybody has seen.

Apparently the "missing tapes" were the original 1-inch magnetic video tapes recorded at each tracking station. But not all are missing -- only some. However to my knowledge I've never seen ANY video from the original tapes which was processed with modern techniques.

So I have two questions: what's the current status of the missing tapes, and has anybody seen Apollo lunar video made from the original tracking station tapes?

wwonka · #20 (**permalink**) 14-October-2008, 10:23 AM

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=51404

..shows a polaroid image of the monitor as it appeared at Honeysuckle Ck, compared to what appeared on tv. Even though it it is still a third-gen copy, the difference is quite dramatic... It seems to me to be worth chasing.

It sounded as though the Peter Clifton tape may have contained at least some of the footage/data in original form and possibly clues to help locate the others, but nothing seems to have happened or been announced.