Back
in July 1969, the first moonwalks by Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
are frozen forever moments in the history books. But it turns out that millions
of riveted spectators back on Earth were on the receiving end of substantially
degraded television showing the epic event.
The
highest-quality television signal from Apollo 11's touchdown zone in the moon's Sea of Tranquility--from an antenna
mounted atop the Eagle lunar lander--was recorded on telemetry tapes at three
tracking stations on Earth: Goldstone in California and Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia.
Scads
of the tapes were produced--and now a search is on to locate them. And if
recovered and given a 21st century digital makeover, they could
yield a far sharper view of that momentous day, compared to what was broadcast around
the globe.
But
Apollo 11 is a memory rewind--now over 37 years old. Nobody is quite sure just
how much longer the original slow-scan tapes will last ... that is, if they
haven't already been erased.
Handled and archived
"I
would simply like to clarify that the tapes are not lost as such, which implies
they were badly handled, misplaced and are now gone forever. That is not the case,"
explained John Sarkissian, operations scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific
and Industrial Research Organization's (CSIRO) Parkes Radio Observatory in Parkes, Australia.
Sarkissian
said the tapes were appropriately handled and archived in the mid 1970's after
the hectic activity of the Apollo lunar landing era was over. "We are confident
that they are stored at [NASA's] Goddard Space Flight Center [in Greenbelt, Maryland] ... we just don't
know where precisely," he told SPACE.com. It is important to note, Sarkissian added, that there is no inference of
wrong-doing, incompetence or negligence on the part of NASA or its employees.
"The
archiving of the tapes was simply a lower priority during the Apollo era. It
should be remembered, that at the time, NASA was totally focused on meeting its
goal of putting a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No
sooner had they done that, than they had to repeat it again a few months later,
and then do it again, repeating it for a total of seven lunar landing missions ... including Apollo 13," Sarkissian
pointed out.
Making
it tough to track down the whereabouts of the data, many of those involved in
the archiving of the tapes have since moved on, retired or passed away, "taking
their corporate memory of where the tapes are with them," Sarkissian said.
It
is important not to exaggerate the quality of the images being sought,
Sarkissian added. "The SSTV was not like modern high definition TV and nor was
it even equal in quality to the normal broadcast TV we are accustomed to
viewing," he said.
Still,
the SSTV was better than the scan-converted images that were broadcast at the
time--which is the only version currently available, Sarkissian concluded.
Paper trail
A
small independent group of Australian and U.S. Apollo tracking station veterans
have embarked on a new search for the Apollo 11 tapes.
The
group is hot on a cold paper trail regarding the location of the data. They're
also on the lookout for anyone involved in the management, disposition and storage of
the Apollo tapes at NASA Goddard--or any other NASA or NASA-utilized facility
where they may have been shipped.
Technical
spokesman for the group is Bill Wood, a retired Apollo tracking station engineer in Barstow, California. He supported all
of the Apollo missions at Goldstone - part of NASA's worldwide network of deep
space antennas run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena,
California.
Wood
hasn't been happy of late with some reports saying that they are looking for
"missing Apollo videotapes"--as well as tabloid claims that NASA had somehow
bungled a task.
"That's
the furthest thing from the truth," Wood told SPACE.com. "There are no
lost Apollo video tapes," he emphasized.
Never-before-seen view
For
the last three or four years, the private group has been searching for special
raw data recordings that contain unconverted slow-scan television (SSTV),
recorded as a backup in case of an equipment glitch or a video circuit outage
during the historic moon strolls of Armstrong and Aldrin.
Since
there were no problems converting the slow-scan signals to National Television
System Committee video standards, there was no need to use the backup
telemetry recordings. Hundreds of boxes of Apollo-era magnetic tapes were
subsequently shipped to NASA Goddard, later to be likely turned over to the National Record Center in Suitland, Maryland, Wood said.
Most of the Apollo tapes were later
returned to NASA Goddard, including the raw Apollo 11 SSTV tapes. However, what
happened to the tapes is not known. Because the SSTV was of superior quality to
the scan-converted pictures broadcast out to the world at large, the hope is to
recover them and give the public a higher-quality, never-before-seen view of
the first human expedition sent to the Moon. Along with video, vintage Apollo
11 telemetry is also being sought.
Wood said he doubts the tapes have been
trashed. On the other hand, there's a 50/50 chance they were recycled.
"Since telemetry recording tapes back then cost
$90 to $100 a reel ... well, that was back when $100 dollars was $100
dollars," Wood said. A magnetic rehab center at Goddard, he said, may have
wiped the tapes clean--a budget-saving measure for reuse of the recording tapes.
"What we're hoping, though, is that
somebody, maybe, might have saved some of them," Wood added. "We want to
interest people to see something better than it happened at the time."
Range of formats
Meanwhile,
at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the search is on.
"Hopefully,
if we can find one set of tapes we can find them all," said Dave Williams of
the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) at the NASA field center. "We
still have some possibilities we're looking into, so I'd say the tapes might be
found and depending on how they have been stored may well be readable," he told
SPACE.com.
Williams
and several colleagues are engaged in the Lunar Data Project--a different effort
to take relevant, scientifically important Apollo data archived at NSSDC--analog
data, microfilm, microfiche, photographic film, or hard copy documents and
digitize that range of formats.
If the data were more readily available and
usable in today's data rich and readable world, restoring Apollo data could
provide a wealth of information for scientific studies and planning for future
lunar exploration.
Migration of data
"There's
a lot of old data that we don't seem to have," suggested Philip Stooke,
Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario's Department of
Geography in London, Ontario, Canada. "I think more Apollo-era science data is
missing too."
Hard
at work on an atlas of lunar exploration, Stooke told SPACE.com that he
was personally looking for images of the Moon taken by Explorer 49, a NASA
radio astronomy mission that settled into lunar orbit in 1973. The probe
carried a panoramic camera to monitor the deployment of its booms.
"It
seems that the science data were preserved...but not those images," Stooke said.
The
entire lunar data hide and seek saga that's alive and well here in the U.S. is being repeated
in Russia too. "I work with people in Moscow who are trying to recover old lunar data," Stooke added.
The
worry that old Apollo tapes can deteriorate is a valid concern, Stooke said.
"Migration of data to new media is essential in digital archiving...and it's an
ongoing problem."
What
about the CD-ROMs of today? Are they going to be readable in 50 years?
"Don't
count on it," Stooke responded.
For details regarding the search for the
Apollo 11 Slow-Scan Television Tapes, cast your eyes on these sites:
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/tapes/Apollo_11_Tape_Search_Flyer.pdf
http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/apollo11/apollo11_sstv_search_report.html
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