by Playfuls Staff |
14th August 2006
Neil Armstrong’s famous words “a small step for a human being, a giant step for mankind” are among the most important pieces of history in the 20th century. But they could forever be just…history.[more]
Apparently, NASA has lost the original tapes where the first steps of a human being on Moon were recorded.
The highest-quality television signal from Apollo 11’s touchdown zone in the moon's Sea of Tranquility — from an antenna mounted atop the Eagle lunar lander — was recorded on telemetry tapes at three tracking stations on Earth: Goldstone in California and Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia.
The television broadcast seen by about 600 million people in July 1969 is preserved for posterity, but the original tapes from which the footage was taken have been mislaid, most likely in NASA's vast archives at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Their apparent loss is quite surprising, since it comes after an intensified current of rumors about a falsified Moon landing, which have spread in the academic community.
The footage could transform our view of the moon landings, offering images far sharper than the blurred, grainy video shown around the world.
To make sure the transmission would make it back to Earth, the images sent from Apollo 11 were recorded at 10 frames per second, and had to be converted to 60 frames per second in order to be broadcast. In the process, much of the detail was lost.
The television footage from the Moon landing could be compared to a photocopy of a photocopy, according to Space.com. However, using state-of-the-art image processing tools from today the revival of the TV shooting could yield answers to many questions.
“I would simply like to clarify that the tapes are not lost as such, which implies they were badly handled, misplaced and are now gone forever. That is not the case,” explained John Sarkissian, operations scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Parkes Radio Observatory in Parkes, Australia.
Sarkissian said the tapes were appropriately handled and archived in the mid-1970s after the hectic activity of the Apollo lunar landing era was over. “We are confident that they are stored at [NASA’s] Goddard Space Flight Center [in Greenbelt, Md.] … we just don’t know where precisely,” he told Space.com. It is important to note, Sarkissian added, that there is no inference of wrongdoing, incompetence or negligence on the part of NASA or its employees.
“The archiving of the tapes was simply a lower priority during the Apollo era. It should be remembered, that at the time, NASA was totally focused on meeting its goal of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No sooner had they done that, than they had to repeat it again a few months later, and then do it again, repeating it for a total of seven lunar landing missions … including Apollo 13,” Sarkissian pointed out.
Making it tougher to track down the whereabouts of the data, many of those involved in the archiving of the tapes have since moved on, retired or passed away, “taking their corporate memory of where the tapes are with them,” Sarkissian said.
Stan Lebar, now 81, was in charge of the images from Apollo 11. What he saw was so blurred that he initially thought something had gone wrong.
"My immediate reaction when I looked over at my counterparts at NASA was, 'What's happening?'" he recalled. "We thought there had been a problem getting the converter to work properly."
Apparently, the alleged loss of the precious tapes in not a unique event at NASA. "I just think this is what happens when you have a large government bureaucracy that functions for decade after decade," said Keith Cowing, editor of the Web site NASAWatch.com. "It's not malicious or intentional, but I think it's unfortunate that NASA doesn't have maybe just one more person whose job it is to look back at its history."
"There's a lot of old data that we don't seem to have," suggested Philip Stooke, Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Geography in London, Ontario, Canada. "I think more Apollo-era science data is missing too."
Hard at work on an atlas of lunar exploration, Stooke told SPACE.com that he was personally looking for images of the Moon taken by Explorer 49, a NASA radio astronomy mission that settled into lunar orbit in 1973. The probe carried a panoramic camera to monitor the deployment of its booms.
"It seems that the science data were preserved…but not those images," Stooke said.
