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Earliest images of the moon were better than people realised
- thelastidiot 8y ago>>> "They set up shop in an abandoned McDonalds, offered to them as free space." I didn't realize there were such a thing as an abandoned McDonalds.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoI think the McDonalds is behind gates or something? As in it’s actually part of the base?
- Animats 8y agoIt's a relic of the days when the base was Naval Air Station Moffett Field, and had a sizable on-base military complement. The Navy moved out in 1994, taking with them most potential McDonalds customers.
- anemic 8y agoI really liked how they used the apparently intact equipment inside the McDonalds like the price signage to show their images. That's no moon! https://www.flickr.com/photos/agentmouthwashfanclubpresident/15201568091/in/album-72157647056082127/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/agentmouthwashfanclubpresident...
- rangibaby 8y agoThis person documents abandoned buildings: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25165196@N08/albums/72157691015994841 https://www.flickr.com/photos/25165196@N08/albums/7215769101... This blog is what it says on the tin (pizza box?): http://usedtobeapizzahut.blogspot.com http://usedtobeapizzahut.blogspot.com
- LambdaComplex 8y agoRelated subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/NotFoolingAnybody/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NotFoolingAnybody/
- russellbeattie 8y agoI've worked next to Moffett for five years, in one of the office buildings overlooking the runway (we have to pause meetings sometimes to let the noise of jets or helicopters pass), and I've gone in to play golf a couple times, yet this is the first I've heard of or seen that building. So weird! Must be in some other corner...
- mchahn 8y ago> using lossless analog compression What does this mean? Analog is inherently lossy to begin with.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoIt's an awkward term, I think by "compression" they actually mean "encoding". The images were probably sent using something like SSTV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television
- dspig 8y agoor just FM - FM on tape was used for data aquisition in the 60s in cases where dynamic range and linearity were more important than bandwidth.
- omeid2 8y agoI think you have got that backwards. A digital signal is inherently lossy as it takes only finite number of values because digital is discrete (0 and 1), whereas analog is continuous and in theory it can encode an infinite number of values, subject to your codec apparatuses limits.
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- mchahn 8y agoI was referring to the fact that an "exact value" doesn't even exist. There is noise on every analog signal. If there is no exact value then lossless becomes a meaningless term.
- taeric 8y agoStrictly, that doesn't matter. Depending on the signal being sent, digital is lossless, as well. Specifically, for a bandlimited signal, digital can be lossless. Basically, the sampling theorem is a hella fun topic. There was a very good video that served as a fun primer on this from a few years ago, if you want me to look it up.
- pietroglyph 8y ago> The Lunar Orbiters never returned to Earth with the imagery. Instead, the Orbiter developed the 70mm film (yes film) and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/mm resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using lossless analog compression, which was yet to actually be patented by anyone. Absolutely incredible! The level of complexity involved involved in space flight, along with the tight tolerances, continually impresses me when I consider the relative success of these missions.
- skunkworker 8y agoAmazing that they could get this from the stored tapes. http://www.worldofindie.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/earthise.old_.new_.hi_.jpg http://www.worldofindie.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/ear...
- pjc50 8y ago> lossless analog compression Are there any details of this? Some of the documents imply it's simply FM modulated, no different from passing a tightly-focused B&W TV camera over the film.
- ithkuil 8y agoWhat does lossless mean in the context of analog processing?
- blattimwind 8y agoIt means you combine things (because it's handy or whatever) in a manner that loses essentially no information. Normally this would just be some kind of modulation. The salient difference being losing information due to technical limitations (SNR, distortion, bandwidth limits) versus designing the system to remove information (lossy). Contrast: lossy analog compression, e.g. colour TV.
- namibj 8y agoSpecifically, PAL-style color subsampling which is more or less YUV 422. They could have fixed it other ways, but they decided to incorporate a quartz glass prism and piezo transducers to realize a 1-scanline physical delay, which they then used to do the analog variant of XORing each line with the one before.
- ehead 8y agoI used to work at Ames in a facility a stone's throw from McMoon's (not singularity University hah). Heard that the guys who worked on this stuff in there were super crochety. I went over there once to check out some old aerospace equipment they had hanging out in the back (I think it was some decrepit rocket engine), and they gave me a classic 'you kids get off my lawn speech' - until they found out that the friend I went with had a PhD in aeronotical engineering. They lightened up after that and we had a great conversation after that. What a wacky group.
- beamatronic 8y agoThe NUMU museum in Los Gatos had an exhibit about this too http://www.numulosgatos.org/exhibitions-2/2016/9/23/mcmoons-how-a-band-of-scientists-saved-lunar-image-history http://www.numulosgatos.org/exhibitions-2/2016/9/23/mcmoons-...
- earenndil 8y agoI wanted to look at the actual files in question, they're purported to be at [1]. However, that just displays a 'file being migrated' message[2], and according to the internet archive it's been that way since 2016[3]...were the images lost after all? 1: https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp_gallery/ https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp_gallery/ 2: https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp/tiff/1101_H2.tif https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp/tiff/1101_H2.tif 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20161231201417/https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp/tiff/1101_H2.tif https://web.archive.org/web/20161231201417/https://loirp.arc...
- ajnin 8y agoThe raw recovered files seems to be available here, in any case : https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/DATA/ https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/DATA/
- sosuke 8y agoGo up a couple directories and get into the extras browse section I found PNGs instead of whatever 600mb files those were. https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/EXTRAS/BROWSE/ https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/EXTRAS/BROW...
- sturmen 8y agoGood find! Now if only there was a way to download them all at once...
- LiamPa 8y ago> After their use, the images were locked away from the public, as at the time they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA’s spy satellite cameras, which the orbiters cameras were designed from. Instead the images from that time were grainy and low resolution, made to be so by NASA. Brilliant! It states they used 70mm film which according to google is used for motion pictures, I assume a custom camera?
- toomanybeersies 8y agoI'm not certain about the film used for the Lunar Orbiter probes, but the cameras that were used by the Apollo astronauts used 70mm film, rather than the 60mm 120 format that was standard for the Hasselblad cameras they used. The size of the frame is the same, but 70mm film is wider because it has sprocket holes that 120 format film lacks. I would imagine that for the Lunar Orbiter probes they did use a custom camera, and didn't just bolt on an off the shelf camera.
- cromulent 8y agoAccording to this article, Walt Schirra's Hasselblad was the first one in space and after that they were used exclusively for some years. I guess before that they were custom. https://www.hasselblad.com/history/hasselblad-in-space/ https://www.hasselblad.com/history/hasselblad-in-space/
- toomanybeersies 8y agoThe first camera that was brought into space for the Mercury program was a remarkably unremarkable Ansco Autoset rangefinder manufactured by Minolta [1] that was picked up at a drug store, which went up with John Glenn. Of course, Hasselblad didn't put that in their marketing material. Nasa then moved to using Nikon cameras around the Spacelab era, and still uses Nikons to this day. [1] https://history.nasa.gov/apollo_photo.html https://history.nasa.gov/apollo_photo.html
- 4ad 8y ago
- NamTaf 8y agoI remember the original articles about building the team to do this recovery/restoration project. I'm so glad to see the results of their efforts!
- aaronbrethorst 8y agoI wish the article got into more of the technical details behind how this actually worked. I find it absolutely jaw-droopingly incredible that they were able to shoot gigabytes of essentially IMAX-quality negatives, develop them in flight (which requires temperatures of around 20ºC for all of the materials involved—Edit: they didn't do this because it would've been too difficult, and ended up using a mostly dry development process. See Edit link), scan them(!!!), and then radio them back to the earth. I would find this amazing today, and all of this happened in the 1960s! Edit here's a little more information: http://www.moonviews.com/2012/06/lunar-orbiters-classified-heritage.html http://www.moonviews.com/2012/06/lunar-orbiters-classified-h..., and the link from there to http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/programs/docs/prog-hist-01.pdf http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/programs/docs/prog-hist-01.p... contains the technical details on the camera I was after. Amazing stuff.
- tajen 8y agoThe most amazing point about landing on the moon in 1969 is that they had to program everything with... negative timestamps. Of course it’s a joke but it highlights how early it was in the history of technology.
- jacobush 8y ago... how. I don't get it.
- _hardwaregeek 8y agoI'm guessing it's a bad joke about Unix time (starts in 1970)
- dboreham 8y agoExcept it's a really good joke.
- nothrabannosir 8y agoIt’s about the unix epoch starting in 1970. -_-
- therealmarv 8y agoGreat article. Digital is not always better, the technology was not there to outperform analogue tech. I even wonder if a digital camera system nowadays can outperform this 2GB images, I mean how do you transfer that amount of data at this long range without loss?! Is that even possible? Maybe this analogue picture compression is something which is still usable and valuable in long distance space transmission?
- setquk 8y ago“Lossless” analogue transmission isn’t lossless. It’s just less lossy than the lossy forms of analogue transmission. As a very simplified example it’s really easy to modulate an analogue value in the frequency domain and maintain accuracy and dynamic range. Hence why FM stereo usually sounds pretty amazing still. It’s not terribly sensitive to environmental factors. However conversely AM sounds like crap. Now we have digital protocols which are still sent on top of analogue signals (everything is analogue down at the bottom, even your CPU). We lose a tiny bit of dynamic range through compression in some circumstances but gain error correction, speed and the ability to recover signals from below the noise floor which means less power and more distance for the same power. So no, digital is definitely the way. As an amateur radio operator, some of us at least tend to play with very low powers. You can have a two way conversation 3000km+ with no more more than a watt but only if you use digital modes. One reason why Morse/CW is still popular; it’s a digital encoding.
- eesmith 8y agoTo add to that, some amateur radio operators bounce their signal off the Moon. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Ear... : > Recent advances in digital signal processing have allowed EME contacts, admittedly with low data rate, to take place with powers in the order of 100 Watts and a single Yagi antenna.
- setquk 8y agoThat's on my bucket list :)
- jedberg 8y agoSo in theory if someone built a robot and spacecraft, the original 70mm negatives could be retrieved from the moon and provide even higher resolution images?
- jl6 8y agoSadly, all the Lunar Orbiter missions ended in an (intentional) impact with the moon. Seems unlikely the film would have survived.
- adrianN 8y agoEven if the orbiters were still orbiting, the film would have degraded due to radiation, I think.
- hornetblack 8y agoIt's really hard to orbit the moon anyway, it's not very spherical compared with the earth.
- eesmith 8y agoPointers for those interested - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)#Effect_of_lunar_mascons_on_satellite_orbits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_orbit#Lunar_frozen_orbits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_orbit#Lunar_frozen_orbi... . The "not very spherical" refers to the shape of the gravitational field, and not simply the physical shape of the Moon.
- ComputerGuru 8y agos/realized/were lead to believe/
- salgernon 8y agoReading about the equipment that they had to cobble together and keep running - reminds me that we keep losing the surplus places in the Bay Area where it would have conceivably been possible to find vintage parts.. weird stuff closed suddenly a few weeks sho, and I fear Halted is on its way out...
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThose places should receive government support (as national heritage museums) or like the internet archive, big corporate sponsors (e.g. google and facebook and co can easily afford to keep those places around as a charity)
- binnesjohn 8y agoHard to believe in mainstream news anymore. Nasa is cought so many times of photoshopping and telling porkypies to people.
- Cofike 8y agoIs there any instances of people claiming the government purposely edited the original images to make them lower quality back when they were first released? I’m curious if anyone realized the government may be hiding their true capabilities.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoI'd like to know more about that too. I can imagine that since the space race and cold war was in full fledge at the time, they neither wanted to give the Russians intel on the moon, nor let them in on their camera quality.
- abecedarius 8y agoIt surprises me they could transmit an analog signal back while keeping its quality secret from the Soviets. I wonder if they did succeed at that, or just at keeping the rest of us in the dark.
- yosito 8y agoIt wasn't like the Soviets could just turn their TVs to the right channel. I doubt the Soviets knew what frequency they were using, and analog video is still "encoded" in the radio waves. These signals still required that specialized $300,000 equipment (which I'm sure was top secret at the time) to make sense of.
- slededit 8y agoThe height of the antenna would give away the frequency. But the soviets had good spy penetration into the US industrial base so it's likely they already knew anyways.
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- ggg9990 8y agoBack then most people would have been supportive of that. If someone noticed they probably wouldn’t say anything for fear of blowing the governments cover.
- orjan 8y agoThe "NASA technician" in the second to last image appears to be airbrushing a large scale version, does anyone know if there are more pictures of this somewhere?
- NietTim 8y agoThis is by far one of my favorite projects I've read about
- ggm 8y agoDescription of dry developing needed! Also that 200pixel/line scanner... Awesome. Basically a fax machine in space.
- pilsetnieks 8y agoActually 200 lines/mm - that would be about 5080 dpi, which would impressive for a modern day scanner as well.
- 4ad 8y agoWhat most people don't realise is that can make film that can record at whatever resolution we need, and we have known how to do this for over a century. It's simply a tradeoff between grain size and sensitivity. For most consumer film sensitivity is usually the more favorable trait. But for special applications we might value smaller grain size. For holographic film we can make it record better than 10000 lines/mm. This is essential because we are recording diffraction patterns.
- gumby 8y agoI'm pretty wowed by the developing as most of chemistry assumes certain earthly constraints (e.g. gravity, convection at the surface of a vessel etc). Nice to be able to use 'earthly' in a non-mystical sense!
- Gibbon1 8y agoLink to a talk about the camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HRF8rQD1Vw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HRF8rQD1Vw Short bit about the film. (cia.gov) https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP33-02415A000500120032-7.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP33-02415...
- theindieg 8y agoThanks, these links are super useful and interesting!
- tome 8y ago"Earliest images of the moon taken from space", I guess?
- sandworm101 8y agoWow. Nobody had bothered to take images of the moon until 1966? All those cameras and telescopes. You would think someone somewhere would have taken a few pictures prior to sending the rocket. Perhaps the article meant that these were the first images from the moon. By the title, I was expecting an article about the first photos of the moon.
- cantrevealname 8y ago> images were locked away from the public as they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA’s spy satellite cameras Whenever I read about 50-year-old government secrets being revealed, I wonder about all the things happening today we're not being told about -- that we'll learn about 50 years from today. Looking at the Earthrise image, as another commenter pointed out, they didn't simply degrade the image, but they deliberately added vertical lines with differing brightness and gain, so it would appear that the film scanners on the Lunar Orbiter could scan only at a very low resolution. To use an analogy: Suppose you request a secret document from the government under the Freedom of Information Act. They decide to give it to you, but they redact 99% of the material with black markers. Oh, but they also retype the entire document, without the blacked-out portions, so you think you received the whole thing. They even add staples, 3-hole punches, coffee cup stains, and creases to the paper before photocopying it. You get 1% of material, but you are convinced that you got the complete unaltered original.
- jaypeg25 8y agoI recently visited the FBI Museum/Tour at the FBI HQ in DC. There's a section where they talk about tech the FBI had in the 80s, including a camera they used for an undercover operation where they recorded some illegal shit going on in a hotel room. You walk into a mock hotel room and even knowing the general vicinity of where the camera should be, struggle to find it. I flat out couldn't until a friend who works at the FBI told me - it was in the period on the artists signature of a piece of artwork in the room. A literal pinhole camera recording everything in the room more than 3 decades ago with pretty great quality. I can't even fathom the technology they have today - there's no chance that'd be on the tour.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoWe've gone backwards from the 60's in some areas. For example, there are no planes as good as the SR-71 any more due to their incredible costs, cheaper to use satellites over the long run. Commitment to manned space exploration is another.
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- javascriptPhD 8y agothe rare 'all terminal Dunning-Krueger sufferers' 'we'
- debt 8y agoI prefer the unrestored version of the images. They feel more real for some reason.
- Spooky23 8y agoMakes me wonder how good the spy satellite pictures of the era were. Wasn’t the technology behind the Corona satellites based on this tech? I wonder if the declassified pictures they release are the lower quality versions?
- slman 8y agoI want make hacker for mobail my waif what to do
- inamberclad 8y agoInterestingly enough, McMoon's has come sorta full circle. As of only a few weeks ago, it was turned into a convenience store named MoonMart.
- mschuster91 8y agoOne can simply wonder how much progress is being kept secret from the world due to nationalistic bullshit. To be honest, I'd not be surprised when in 2060, someone says "we had all the stuff in the Avengers movies as actual, real technology back then". And one can only wonder if the hundreds of billions sunk into programs like the F35 or the European A400M program haven't simply been used to fund skunk works projects instead.
- Teknoman117 8y agoMakes you wonder what things we're capable of today that the public has no idea about...
- spyder 8y agoA short video from when they got the tape machines working in McMoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awc6dm_kvV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awc6dm_kvV8 There are more videos on the same YouTube channel.
- bitcoinisqueen 8y agoLookup "apollo moon takeoff" on youtube. Watch it a couple of times, I strongly encourage this.