What is the "Luna Orbiter Image Restoration Project" that revives the high resolution photos of the moon taken about 50 years ago in the present age?

"Luna OrbiterImage restoration project "is a project to restore high resolution photographs taken on the moon as modern digital images, unmanned lunar explorers" Luna Orbiter "launched about 50 years ago. In the restoration of the photograph taken at that time, it took a lot of work such as restoring the machine to restore the recorded data, but as of 2018 it succeeded in restoring 2000 images as of 2018 ... apparently ...

McMoon: How the Earliest Images of the Moon Were so Much Better than we Realized - World of Indie
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The five Luna Orbiter, launched from the earth from 1966 to 1967, are the later manned lunar landing project "Apollo project"In order to investigate the landing site of the moon, had the function to take a high resolution photo of the moon. The pictures taken here are used only for Apollo planning, and it was rare that the photos were released.


At that time, the image taken by Luna OrbiterMagnetic tapeIt was preserved in Maryland State since the Apollo project. After that, in 1986 these tapesNASAofJet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL), and will be left to decide what to do with Nancy Evans, who was doing the official document storage work at JPL then, but he did not dispose of the tape and kept it I will decide.

And a few years later Evans began to think that "image data of Luna Orbiter should be restored for the future", NASA'sAmes Research Center, And decided to start the "Luna Orbiter Image Restoration Project" to digitize photos taken with Luna Orbiter.

However, Luna Orbiter's image restoration will be extremely difficult. The project team succeeds in acquiring four tape drives "Ampex FR - 900" actually used by NASA in order to read the magnetic tape of Luna Orbiter, but the obtained equipment wears dust, It was even broken, so we decided to start cleaning and restoring the equipment.


After that, preparing to extract data is completed by attaching a demodulator for reading the data saved on the magnetic tape, an analog / digital converter, and a monitor for checking the data. However, the difficulties of the project team are still going on. The number of magnetic tapes containing the photographs taken by Luna Orbiter was 1,500, and no label was affixed to each tape. For this reason, in order to restore one image, it is necessary to investigate which tapes the data stored in the tape is related one by one, so it takes a very time consuming work is.


The project team, which started full-scale image restoration work since 2007, succeeded in restoring the first image in November 2008 and restored 2000 images as of 2018. The restored image is a huge image file even in modern times, and it seems that if you set the maximum resolution, it will be about 2 GB per one. One of the actually reconstructed lunar photos is the following image and you can see that it is high quality that you can not think that it was taken about 50 years ago.