The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) was a project to digitize the original analog data tapes from the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that were sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967; it was funded by NASA, SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and private individuals.
The first image to be successfully recovered by the project was released in November 2008. It was the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon, taken in August 1966. On February 20, 2014, the project announced it had completed the primary tape capture portion of the project. One medium resolution image, most of one high resolution image and parts of three others are missing, apparently due to lapses at the time they were being recorded. The rest of the Lunar Orbiter images have been successfully recovered and have been published in NASA's Planetary Data System.
Background The images taken by the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were primarily used to locate landing sites for the crewed Apollo missions. Once those missions were over, the data, on about 1,500 tapes, was largely forgotten since it had served its purpose. The original tapes were carefully archived for 20 years by the government in Maryland. When the tapes were released back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, in 1986, the decision of whether to scrap the tapes became the responsibility of JPL archivist Nancy Evans. She decided that the tapes should be preserved. She recalled, "I could not morally get rid of this stuff".
Within a few years, Nancy Evans and a few colleagues were able to start a small project with funding from NASA. They managed to find four rare Ampex FR-900 tape drives – highly specialized drives that had only been used by government agencies such as the FAA, USAF, and NASA. (The FR-900's transport was adapted from the two-inch Quadruplex videotape format, only in the FR-900's case, the drive was designed to record a wideband analog signal of any type for instrumentation or other purposes, rather than specifically a video signal as in the two-inch Quad's case.) Over time, Evans' team also collected documentation and spare parts for the tape drives from various government surplus sources.
The project was successful at getting the raw analog data from the tapes, but in order to generate the images, they discovered that they needed the specialized demodulation hardware that had been used by the Lunar Orbiter program but no longer existed. The members of the team attempted to get funding from NASA and private sources to build the hardware, but they were unsuccessful. Eventually, both Nancy Evans and Mark Nelson went on to other projects while the tape drives sat in Evans's garage.
In 2004, Philip Horzempa was doing research on the Lunar Orbiter program at the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C. In its archives, he happened to come across a memo from 1996 containing a proposal by Mark Nelson to digitize the Lunar Orbiter images, as described above. After about a year of searching, Horzempa made contact with Mark Nelson. The two of them decided to find funding and to restart the Lunar Orbiter tape recovery effort. They made contact with Jen Heldmann of the NASA Ames Research Center.
In early 2007, Horzempa commented on the Lunar Orbiter tape recovery effort on a Web forum, NASASpaceflight.com. As a result, Dennis Wingo contacted Philip Horzempa through that forum. Horzempa put Wingo in contact with Nelson and Evans, and they invited Wingo to join the team. In addition to the tape drives mentioned above, Nelson had been able to obtain several tape heads. The tape drives were absolutely essential to any effort to read the original Lunar Orbiter data tapes.
Dennis Wingo is president of the aerospace engineering company SkyCorp and a long-time worker in space and computing technologies. He knew he could muster the technical skills to tackle the management of renovating the tape drives, he could find contacts at NASA, and most importantly, he knew that the Moon was becoming a hot property again. Wingo said, "I knew the value of the tape drives and the tapes". Another group thought the same, writing, "future missions to the Moon have re-energized the lunar community and renewed interest in the Lunar Orbiter data".
A newer spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), entered orbit around the Moon on June 23, 2009, and, after testing, it began its photographic mission that September. One of LRO's primary goals is to determine the risk to people working on the surface of the Moon. The LRO can create images of the surface that are comparable to the highest resolution images taken of the Moon from orbit during the Apollo era. The original Lunar Orbiter images were the highest resolution images ever taken of the Moon from orbit prior to the LRO's photography. Digitized Lunar Orbiter images would be invaluable to scientists studying changes in the Moon's surface.
Expertise and facilities
In February 2007, Wingo visited the four Ampex FR-900 tape drives for the first time in Evans's garage. Each drive was about tall, wide, as deep as a refrigerator, and weighed about . These were all coated with thick layers of dust and cobwebs. They were stored with a pallet of manuals and schematics for the tape drives, along with hard copies of data related to the lunar images. Meanwhile, the tapes were stored safely in a climate-controlled warehouse. There were about 1,500 tapes, all packed into boxes, stacked four deep on pallets, and shrink-wrapped.
Wingo and Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and president of SpaceRef Interactive, respectively, now served as co-leaders of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). Both Cowing and Wingo provided the funds required to get the project started. They spent about a year looking for more funding, facilities, documentation, and expertise. Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, agreed to store the tape drives and tapes in unused warehouse space until funding and facilities could be found to begin the restoration project.
In April 2007, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released the tapes to the custody of Ames Research Center. Evans also transferred the ownership of the FR-900 drives to Wingo and Cowing. Wingo and Cowing rented two transfer trucks, loaded up the tape drives and documentation into one truck, and loaded the pallets of analog data tapes into the other truck. Cowing and Wingo then drove the trucks up to Mountain View, California, from Burbank. The drives and tapes then sat in storage for about the next year as funding for the project was sought.
Since the team required a facility with proper heating and cooling, and a sink, available vacant buildings outside the gate of Ames Research Center were whittled down to two: a barber shop, and a McDonald's restaurant that had closed weeks before. The barber shop was relatively small, so working there would have required that the tapes be stored at a separate warehouse. On the other hand, the former McDonald's was much larger, had good lighting, adequate power, air conditioning, and parking. The building turned out to need some improvements in the electrical wiring. By July 2008, the team had moved into the former McDonald's (Building 596), now dubbed "McMoon's".
Wingo and Cowing quickly found more expertise in Ken Zin, a U.S. Army veteran who had long experience in working with analog tape machines, including the FR-900 series. By coincidence, Zin's brother worked at NASA Ames Research Center and it is via this coincidence that Wingo and Cowing initially got in touch with Zin. With the assistance of Ken Davidian at NASA Headquarters, funding was found in 2008 for a pilot project to show that the drives could be repaired, and that images could be recovered from the original tapes. The first task was to methodically disassemble and clean the tape drives. Meanwhile, Zin began testing the systems of the tape drives and making lists of devices to replace and refurbish. Parts for the drives were bought on eBay, online electronic parts stores, and other places.
Management and recruiting allies Wingo and Cowing plunged into the management of the project: ordering parts, managing funds, searching surplus yards for equipment, researching refurbishing companies, and recruiting allies to the project. He began sending out an email newsletter, one that was later converted to a blog, MoonViews.com, and posting photos to the project's Facebook page. Student interns from the nearby San Jose State University were recruited, and the team requested help from retired and current employees of Ampex and from blog writers with audiences that might be able to help. Every day there seemed to be a new visitor to McMoon's, such as Dr. Lisa Gaddis from the USGS project to digitize the Lunar Orbiter films, and Charlie Byrne, who wrote the memo recommending that the Lunar Orbiter data be stored on magnetic tape. The project was reported in the Los Angeles Times, Computerworld, National Geographic, the Associated Press, American Libraries, the local news, and numerous blogs. The project was funded by NASA, SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and private individuals.
Included in every news story was the message that the images are a vital piece of history, but more than this, that they contain scientific data of a time, place, and quality that has not been repeated. These are images that can assist in the current research about the Moon and the climate of the Earth. There may even be other lost data from the same era recorded using the same tape drives that could benefit from the efforts of the LOIRP team.
Media and metadata
Shortly after moving into McMoon's, a group of students from the NASA Astrobiology Academy was recruited to remove all the tapes from the boxes, and put the tapes in order. Each tape takes about an hour to run on the tape drive, and holds one high-resolution image and one medium-resolution image. When archived in the early 1970s, each reel of tape was labeled, wrapped in a clear plastic bag, and enclosed in a mu-metal tin, and sealed with yellow plastic tape. Additional labels have been placed on the outside of the tape container. Each tape is labeled with a code that usually consists of two letters and two numbers, for example: MT_19, WT_45, and GT_46. One of the Astrobiology Academy students realized that the first letter indicated which ground station recorded the data on the tape in that container: "M" indicates that the tape was recorded in Madrid, Spain; "W" indicates that the tape was recorded in Woomera, Australia; and "G" indicates that the tape was recorded in Goldstone, California. This guess was confirmed when the team listened to the audio track at the beginning of a few of the tapes, wherein the operator of the ground station recites information about the tape and the recording. On tapes marked with an "M", the operator has a distinctly Spanish accent. On tapes marked with a "W", the operator has a distinctly Australian accent. On tapes marked with a "G" the operator speaks with an American accent. Sometimes audio track captures an operator at one tracking station talking to an operator at another tracking station. Each tape's opening audio includes the date that the tape was recorded in both local and Universal Time.
Hardware and funding
In a completed and working magnetic tape drive system, the tape-drive heads apply a very specific magnetic field to the tape; the tape then induces a change in electric current, which is captured. The data from the Lunar Orbiter tapes is then run through a demodulator, and through an analog-to-digital converter so that it can be fed into a computer for digital processing. Each image is divided up into strips on the tape, so the computer is used to bring the strips together to create a whole image.