The
hunt for magnetic tapes that recorded the original Apollo 11 moonwalks of Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin in 1969 has swung into high gear.
A
full-scale look for the original tapes is now underway at the NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland--the site where the material may be
housed, or at another location within the NASA archiving system.
Despite
the challenges of the search, the space agency maintains it does not consider
the tapes to be lost.
For
the past 18 months or so, NASA Goddard had been carrying out a casual look for
the tapes--replaced recently by a more formal look-see.
NASA
engineers are hopeful that when--and if--the moonwalk tapes are unearthed, they
can use today's digital technology to provide a version of the moonwalk that is
much better quality than what was broadcast throughout the world over 37 years
ago.
Bolstering
that belief is the fact that Goddard engineers were able to extract data from a
nearly-identical type of tape recorded in 1969 of an Apollo simulation from the
Honeysuckle Creek, Australia tracking station. That provides optimism that when
the tapes are located, experienced tape handlers can preserve original video.
Exhaustive
search
"We've kicked off
an exhaustive search," said Dolly Perkins, Deputy Director-Technical at the
NASA Goddard field center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We are pulling every record
we can find that has any link to the handling and storage of Apollo records."
Director
of NASA Goddard, Edward Weiler, asked Perkins to be the management lead of the
group conducting the hunt for the Apollo tapes.
In
the event the tapes are found, steps would be taken to assure that all the
unique hardware required to process the Apollo 11 moonwalk tapes is still
available and can be used to make digital reproductions of the tapes. Those tapes
would then be kept with the NASA History Office to make sure the video is
protected and restored as needed.
Goddard's
ramp up to a formal search for the tapes is good news, said Richard Nafzger,
who is leading the engineering side of the search at Goddard.
"We
are quite busy organizing this search in a logical manner as, prior to this,
searching has been an informal--as time allows--effort on my part," Nafzger told SPACE.com.
Important clues
In responding to a SPACE.com query, Perkins said that part of the
detective work is a physical search of any facility thought to have been used
to store Apollo tapes, including the National Records Center, buildings at
Goddard, or any storage facility that contractors may have used back then, or
since.
"We
are even pulling old phone books from the 1970's and 1980's so we can contact
as many people as possible who worked in records management, or for the manned
spaceflight program, to see if they have any information that might be valuable
to our search," Perkins said. "We've received hundreds of calls and e-mails
from people who think they may have important clues, and we're following up on
all reasonable inputs," she added.
Perkins said that, given all the reporting on the search for the Apollo TV
tapes, an important point has been lost.
"All
of the important technical, biomedical and scientific information from the
Apollo landings was transmitted in real time to Mission Control in Houston, recorded and preserved," Perkins noted. Those data are not lost, and are in fact
secured in the nation's archives, she said.
"The
one thing we don't have, because it only exists on these tapes, is the original
slow-scan TV of the lunar EVAs [the moonwalks]. Only in recent years has
technology advanced to the point where extracting the information digitally
from the original Apollo television became a viable proposition," Perkins said.
Hopeful...but realistic
As
for the search now ongoing, Perkins explained: "We're hopeful, but at the same
time realistic."
Tapes
of the sort being sought were highly specialized, Perkins continued, typically
kept only until a mission was completed.
"It
would have been common procedure to reuse such tapes for other missions or to
destroy them at some point," Perkins advised.
"Our
hope is that someone had the foresight to realize that this might happen one
day, and put the tapes into permanent storage rather than following typical
procedure," Perkins said. "Finding the records will give us the answer one
way or the other."
Re-process for posterity
Stan
Lebar, during his career at Westinghouse, served as Program Manager of the
Apollo TV Lunar Camera which recorded the first steps onto the lunar surface by
Armstrong and Aldrin back in July 1969. He and several other Apollo-era
retirees stirred up early interest in finding the tapes.
"We
are fighting a ticking clock," Lebar told SPACE.com, "where on the one
hand the magnetic medium of the tapes have a definitive lifetime. If we wait
too long we may find tapes that no longer contain recoverable data. On the
other hand, those of us that were intimately involved in the Apollo 11 activity--and
understand every aspect of the process that took place--are passing on in
large numbers," he warned.
Lebar
said that the premise of the search for the elusive Apollo 11 tapes is that the
very best recording of this singular moment in the history of
humankind should be made available to those that follow Apollo's small step,
but giant leap.
"That
very best recording is out there somewhere and the least we can do is make the
effort to salvage it, re-process it and make it available for posterity before
it is lost forever," Lebar said.
For
details about the Apollo 11 Slow-Scan Television Tapes, more information can be
found at 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
advertisement
