Early Visions of Earth and the Moon

Now that the Indian Space Research Organisation has rammed into the Moon with their Moon Impact probe, it’s time to look back at the U.S.’s own first efforts to study our nearest neighbor in space. The early heady early days of lunar exploration — a time that I look back to through a certain thickness of rose-colored glasses — brought humanity’s first looks at our planet as a planet — and of course, our first up-close visions of the Moon’s surface. I was in grade school then, getting ready for the rigors of junior high and high school, and I was space-mad even then. I pored over every picture they published from the Gemini and Lunar Orbiter missions, and then once we started sending people to the Moon, I followed that, too.

So, it was fun to see the first of what I hope are many of the 1960s-era “glamour shots” of the Moon and Earth being re-released by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program. These images were first used to help pinpoint landing spots for the subsequent Apollo missions. At the time they were sent back, the technology to recover high-resolution imagery didn’t exist, but the data were there. Scientists got what they needed from the tapes and then put them in storage.

Fast-forward a few decades and the tape drives containing all that information were the subject of a rescue effort by Nancy Evans (who worked at JPL) and Mark Nelson (from CalTech).  They spent some time trying to raise private funds to recover the data, and eventually the tapes and drives got sent back to storage in a barn in Sun Valley, California.

Eventually the tapes made their way back to NASA Ames and the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program was born, led by Dennis Wingo (the project program lead).

The cool thing about the recovery of these images is that they are still extremely scientifically useful, especially now that high-tech image recovery and enhancement techniques can be used to bring out the full resolution inherent in the data.  The restored images will give scientists a basic set of images — a baseline, if you will — against which they can measure the images now coming in from various lunar probes, and particularly those from the upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission in 2009. Any surface changes that have occurred since the Lunar Orbiter images were taken will be quite obvious and will help mission planners assess the long-term risks that moon explorers and eventual colonists will have to face as they set up shop on the Moon’s surface. The recovered images will be made available to the public as they come out of the recovery “chute” at Ames, and will also be put into the Planetary Data System. The USGS will be working on calibrating them with standard mapping coordinates to bring them up to par with other solar system bodies over the past decades.