posted 07-14-2006 03:25 AM               

On July 21st 1969, Honeysuckle Creek observatory brought us the first TV pictures of men on the moon. The original signals were recorded on high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes. What was released to the TV networks was reduced to lower quality commercial TV standards. Unfortunately John Sarkissian of Parkes Observatory Australia reports that 698 of the 700 boxes of original tapes have gone missing from the U.S. National Archives. Even more worryingly, the last place on earth which can actually read these tapes is scheduled to close in October this year. The PDF contains interesting comparisons which show that if all you've seen are the TV pictures from the landing, you really haven't seen the first moon walk in its full glory.

posted 08-15-2006 07:52 AM               

Wood hasn't been happy of late with some reports saying that they are looking for "missing Apollo videotapes" -- as well as tabloid claims that NASA had somehow bungled a task.

"That's the furthest thing from the truth," Wood told SPACE.com. "There are no lost Apollo video tapes," he emphasized.

posted 08-15-2006 07:56 AM               

To be clear, these are telemetry tapes, not videotapes, and the slow-scan TV could be extracted from the telemetry tapes and since this would be prior to processing would be better than existing material. It would still have to be converted to regular television, but can be done without the issues that diminished the picture in July 1969.

posted 08-15-2006 10:37 AM               

Mark Gray (Spacecraft Films), if you're reading this... you have to be both elated and a little frustrated at the same time to see the nearly tabloid style attention this story is suddenly receiving!

posted 08-15-2006 11:42 AM               

Unfortunately an unwanted by-product is that the moon-hoax crowd are crying foul despite the fact that all video is currenty available, albeit in 1969 scan converted quality. Curiously they believe the tapes will reveal HDTV quality when the camera was limited to 320 lines of resolution.

What the tapes will provide is a pre-scan converted image that is without satellite, kinescope and optical conversion noise.

posted 08-15-2006 02:18 PM               

I hope this doesn't come off as a rant, but here you are.

If it weren't for Stan and Bill and some others who thought about the fact that the slow-scan TV might be retrieved from the telemetry tapes nobody would have thought anything of the Apollo 11 video. As it is they've been after these particular tapes now for several years, and THAT is the real story. These guys have been working and working to try and improve the record, and all the media can get out of it is to take the low road and try and make NASA look stupid. I'll always be baffled by a media that thinks the government should run everything and then rejoices in reporting government's shortcomings, all without checking any facts.

The facts remain that no videotapes are missing... that while the slow-scan video which could be retrived from the telemetry tapes would be of better quality than the converted footage now available, one still couldn't characterize it as "high-quality" video. The resolution limitations will still be there.

Yet because of the sensationalism that has become rampant through the media - and not just the tabloids, but all media - stories are all over the place this week about how "NASA has lost the Apollo 11 videotapes." Rubbish.

This kind of journalistic garbage doesn't do anything to get us back to the moon any sooner, that's for sure.

Personally I've tried to help the searchers wherever I can, though with their knowledge of the original systems and how the telemetry was stored that help has been miniscule. The only way I could really help was try to point out things I had seen or heard about at the archives, etc.

posted 08-15-2006 10:59 PM               

Update: Apollo 11 Tapes

NASA personnel continue to sift through 37-year-old records in their attempt to locate the magnetic tapes that recorded the original Apollo 11 video in 1969. The original tapes may be at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which requested their return from the National Archives in the 1970s, or at another location within the NASA archiving system. Despite the challenges of the search, NASA does not consider the tapes to be lost.

posted 08-21-2006 04:06 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Dwight:
The TV downlink kinescopes are all intact, and there is nothing on the missing tapes which hasn't been seen before.

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posted 08-24-2006 03:36 PM               

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.

posted 11-03-2006 09:23 AM               

Vintage Apollo space missions tapes uncovered at a university in Western Australia are not what a team of experts are trying to locate.

"These aren't the tapes we're looking for," said John Sarkissian, operations scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's (CSIRO) Parkes Radio Observatory in Parkes, Australia.

posted 01-31-2007 10:08 AM               

As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his "one small step" onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander's door clicked on to capture that first human contact with the lunar surface. The ghostly images of the astronaut's boot touching the soil record what may be the most iconic moment in NASA history, and a major milestone for mankind.

Millions of television viewers around the world saw those fuzzy, moving images and were amazed, even mesmerized. What they didn't know was that the Apollo 11 camera had actually sent back video far crisper and more dramatic -- spectacular images that, remarkably, only a handful of people have ever seen.

posted 06-28-2009 12:11 PM            

The Sunday Express can now reveal that the missing tapes containing the original high quality images have been found.

posted 06-28-2009 12:15 PM               

On Twitter, Bob Jacobs, NASA's Associate Administrator for Public Affairs, is cautioning those who link to the article:

There is a search that is winding down. We hope to release an update publicly in the next few weeks. The UK report is fiction.

posted 07-17-2009 10:12 AM               

• "Lost tapes" lost for good, NASA releases restored footage of first moonwalk
  
• Apollo 11: NASA releases restored moonwalk video

posted 11-04-2009 08:29 AM               

Although a search for the VR-660C recordings at the National Archives and the WNRC has yielded nothing, Nafzger, Wood, Lebar, and other members of the Goddard search team are hopeful that APL will one day find them in their holdings. If APL finds the recordings, NASA will be ready: it is maintaining its capability to playback and view one- and two-inch tapes if they are ever found.