If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the 24
astronauts who launched to the Moon almost 40 years ago returned a tome some
72,000 pages long.
And since their journey from the Moon back to the Earth,
their collective 36,000 literally irreplaceable
images have remained in deep-freeze storage at NASA Johnson Space Center in
Houston, Texas. With only a few exceptions, the majority of the photos seen by
the public have been duplicates made from copies of the originals produced by
the space agency between 1968 and 1972.
And like anyone who has duplicated a copy knows, the result
is never as crystal clear as the original.
It is with that in mind that Arizona State University has
partnered with NASA to scan the space-flown camera film in an effort to create
a new, high-resolution digital archive for both researchers and the general
public on the Internet.
Begun in June 2007 and expected to take three years to
complete, the Apollo Image Archive is the first project
to make digital scans of all the lunar photographs — both from orbit and on the
surface — captured during NASA's
Apollo missions.
"This project fulfills a long-held wish of mine,"
said Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the camera that will fly on
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, due for launch in October 2008.
"It'll give everyone a chance to see this unique collection of images as
clearly as when they were taken." Robinson is also a professor at ASU's
School of Earth and Space Exploration.
"We worked with the scanner's manufacturer -- Leica
Geosystems -- to improve the brightness range that the scans record,"
explained Robinson. In technical terms, a normal 12-bit scan was increased to
14-bit, resulting in digital images that record more than 16,000 shades of
gray.
"Similarly," added Robinson, "to get all the
details captured by the film, we are scanning at a scale of 200 pixels per
millimeter." As a result, the grain of the original film is visible when
the scans are fully enlarged.
The most detailed images from lunar orbit show rocks and
other surface features about 40 inches (one meter) wide. In raw form, the scans
of the Apollo mapping frames, each 4.7 inches square (30 centimeters square),
are 1.3 gigabytes in size.
"That's bigger than most people want to look at with a
browser," observed Robinson, "even if their browser and internet
connection are up to the job." So the archive's website uses a Flash-based
application called Zoomify, which lets users dive deep into a giant image by
loading only the portion being examined.
Users can also download images in several sizes, up to the
full raw scan.
When finished, the archive will include about 600 frames in
35 mm, roughly 20,000 Hasselblad 60 mm frames (color, and black and white),
more than 10,000 mapping camera frames and about 4,600 panoramic cam frames.
"These
photos have great scientific value, despite being taken decades ago,"
concluded Robinson. "I think they also give everybody a beautiful look at
this small, ancient world next door to us."
Copyright 2007 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
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