The Shuttle launch may have been delayed by two days, but NASA has better news to report. caffiend666 writes "As speculated a few weeks ago, NASA has found and is starting to restore the lost Apollo 11 tapes. A Briefing will be held July 16th at the Newseum in Washington to 'release greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk... 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.'"
Excellent! I wonder if there's any evidence of UFOs.
Glad they were able to grab the images off the tape, and I look forward to looking at it, and meeting our new alien overlords.
No, these are just the "Special Edition" version of the faked moon landing tapes. It was "produced" by Lucas Films, in collaboration with NASA, and contain newly added footage and CGI-enhanced visuals.
They look great, but some have already complained that the new tapes show Buzz Aldrin touching the surface first, which completely changes the character and motivation of the scene.
They look great, but some have already complained that the new tapes show Buzz Aldrin touching the surface first, which completely changes the character and motivation of the scene.
I can accept that, but what really ruined the tapes for me was the new extended musical sequence.
If there were life intelligent enough to travel between the stars, do you REALLY think they'd allow an agency like NASA keep it under wraps? Seriously... you grossly overestimate the competence of government. Shit is nowhere NEAR that in control, by anyone.
Why do you think we are of an concern to them? Allegedy - Allegedy - the UFO just sat there at the edge of the crater for a while, then moved off once the astronauts came out. The aliens are not the ones concerned. So why would they be concerned about our ability to use chemical-based engines to reach our first orbital body if the travel between stars?
As for our government control, that Russian hacker who got arrested for breaking tin to NASA computers allegedly had recovered images with alien craft. Now fi
Unverifiable links by anonymous authors citing anonymous sources are no better than science fiction. At least Isaac Asimov signed his work.
There is jack and shit for evidence of intelligent alien life as of today. I'm sure the Russian hacker THOUGHT he could find images... where is the proof he did? Did he disseminate any of them? Any that cannot be easily dismissed as various atmospheric and interference phenomena? I mean, there are people who still think the moon images were faked, even though there hav
With all due respect, the GP said 'There is jack and shit for evidence of intelligent alien life as of today', and he is entirely correct despite your ranting - there is no evidence of intelligent alien life as of today. None.
Initially I thought the headline read "Nasa Has Lost the Tapes", and I almost believed it. "What? Already? They lost them again? Those idiots!... oh wait."
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday July 13, @08:21PM (#28685167)
Coincidence. The search kicked off at least seven years ago [honeysucklecreek.net], when an ex-Honeysuckle Creek employee discovered an old tape in his garage. It was sent for analysis, in the hope that high resolution video of the Apollo 11 landing could be recovered. The tape turned out not to be of the moon landing. It did prompt people to ask "what happened to the originals", and kicked off a serious search. It turned out that NASA has misplaced their own copies.
Copies of the telemetry tapes (hundreds of them) were eventually discovered in the basement of the Physics building at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. They had been placed in the Uni's care by an Australian scientist (Brian O'Brien) who had run an Apollo experiment. He had the tapes as a record of the data from his own experiment, but by luck the telemetry stream includes everything, including the video. It turns out that Curtin Uni thought they weren't that important, on the basis that if they were important, NASA would have already had copies.
Well the retroreflectors are there since they are still used for measurement purposes, but they could have been planted there by compliant aliens I guess...
NASA is under orders to retain all data from planetary missions, including lunar missions. Once the data as been recovered, what are NASA's plans to archive and prevent the data from being lost over the next 40, or 400 years? How will they plan on making the data available to general public?
This is one nice and juicy little factoid. Consider how much mythology lives around these hidden tapes. There was no way for Nixon to be implicated in their tampering...
It's a neat mythology: if you believe the Moon Landing was faked, a hoax, then the soon-to-come high-def photos of the moon should answer that by showing the trash we left behind and that should still be there, the Lunar Landers. And if the landings are proven by the images to have actually occurred, then those same people can migrate to the idea that alien presences on the Moon were airbrushed out. Terrible tragedy it is for NASA that so many of their moon photos have obvious smudge marks over certain details. It would be nice to find out if those were alien ruins, waving aliens or just machine malfunctions
It's a neat mythology: if you believe the Moon Landing was faked, a hoax, then the soon-to-come high-def photos of the moon should answer that by showing the trash we left behind and that should still be there, the Lunar Landers.
If you believe the landing was faked, then the fact that the high-res tapes were found only after sophisticated digital photo-shop techniques were developed helps cement your belief.
NASA doesn't have any lost tapes. If they have found them, they are by definition not lost anymore. I bet there are dozens of tapes that are lost because nobody knows their location but these tapes are not one of them. Correct headline would be "NASA has the found tapes". Sounds redundant? In the human mind that may be the case but if you think about it long enough, you can only come to this conclusion. Being lost is quite a fleeting and interesting feature and has no doubt been studied by filosophers around the ages.
Lost is not being used as an adjective anymore in this statement. Lost is now being used as an identifier, a name for, the tapes. The only purpose of calling them the lost tapes is to differentiate them from the other tapes they previously had. Making the headline "NASA has the found tapes" makes the statement more confusing and the title "NASA has found the tapes" would be equivalent to the current title.
Of course, assuming the identifier 'Lost' is sufficient (given the context) is just leaving this story
...here [wired.com]. Finding the tapes seemed nearly impossible at the time (2007) - the old reel-to-reel machines were dead, whole warehouses were being closed, and the people who were actually driving the recovery effort were mostly Apollo-class themselves - well into their golden years. It reminded me of some of the Library of Congress horror stories, only more desperate and with better special effects. If they do have the footage and can actually decode it, this is an amazing find - I wasn't holding out much hope.
Another cool site is Colin Mackellar's Honeysuckle Creek Tribute Site [honeysucklecreek.net]. Tons of info on the recording, the differences in quality, etc.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday July 13, @07:44PM (#28684933)
RTFA.
This is the 320 mode. It's higher quality because the broadcast version was converted to standard TV by pointing a video camera at a screen showing the transmitted version.
It's higher quality because the broadcast version was converted to standard TV by pointing a video camera at a screen showing the transmitted version.
I knew it! Those NASA bastards exploited the analog hole. Quick, get the MPAA on the phone and have somebody distract NewYorkCountryLawyer so he can't interfere. We finally have NASA right where we want them.....
the truth is that they had the tapes all along... its just that the technology finally exists to remove all the alien spacecraft from the footage. Now they can show it to us in the alien free form god intended
Actually, if I remember correctly, all the 'monitors' that you see in the control room were all TV sets. There were only one set of computer monitors with a video camera infront of each one. You saw different data screens by changing channels.
What was the scan resolution of a TV in 1969? Wikipedia says 262.5 lines per field. 320 > 262.5.
It's like going from youtube quality to HQ YouTube for free! (and a 50 year wait). We should get 640x(480?) resolution video, interlaced as a result. Who knows what the framerate will be - perhaps 30fps? I'm pretty sure the 8mm video that's been distributed was originally 24fps, and then degraded further to 30fps again. The moon video's motion might look different from what we see now.
You're correct about NTSC not having a set horizontal resolution. Some could display upwards of 400 lines of horizontal resolution, but most TVs were designed with 320 +/- in mind. VCRs were lucky to get past 250; reason most stuff recorded on videotape appears excessively blurry. And one needs to think back to the early computer days in which the display and graphics were designed for existing TV-based CRT screen hardware.
In regards to the vertical resolution, some of the 262 lines are in the overscan area on CRT based monitors leaving about 240 lines viewable.
RTFA. Or for that matter, RT-previous-FA regarding the missing tapes. They are not claiming that these tapes are high-resolution or higher quality than current TV signals. They are claiming that they are higher quality than the images broadcast 40 years ago, and replayed often since.
The reason is that forty years ago these (slow-scan, lower resolution) tapes were broadcast by pointing a television camera to a display monitor, which was itself a television set. This greatly degraded the picture; but what
We've sent probes down to the Marianas trench, so why aren't we living in bubbles down there? It's the same sort of question. Basically, because it's 'king hard to do still.
Apollo was *unbelievably* expensive (now adjust for inflation!) to achieve and had ENORMOUS political backing... but well... not very much in terms of science got done (engineering, sure, but science? Not so much). We can now do that science *MUCH* better from, say, the International Space Station, Hubble or the Mars Rovers. There's
In 1969 the Americans first landed men on the moon. Now some people have made names for themselves by saying that this and subsequent landings never happened. Their position is that NASA faked them in order to save face and fool the public. To prove their point they rely on explanations of the reported events using dubious science and lay explanations that any first year science major would and does, laugh at.
However, they always miss or purposely avoid the the one piece of irrefutable proof that it did in fact happen. That is that the Soviet government never refuted the American claims and they were in a unique position to do so. For even after the Americans landed on the moon the Soviets still continued to send orbiters, landers and rovers to the moon.
Now if they wanted to get the goods on the Americans all they had to do was to land, photograph or explore with a rover the American landing sights. Just imagine the embarrassment not to mention the the damage to American credibility, at the height of the cold war no less, that such information would generate. Records even show that they never landed or even explored that areas that that American landings happened. So they did not even go and look to make sure because they knew it really happened.
But they did not. They did not use it to pressure the Americans to stop bombing North Vietnam and Cambodia where Soviet military advisers were being killed as a result. They did not use it to pressure the United States to stop sending military advisers to and providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan fighters during the Soviet occupation. They did not use it to stop the Star Wars program of the Regan administration.
In fact they did not even use it to turn the West's attention away from the Soviet Union during the Soviet Coup of 1991 when members of the Soviet government briefly deposed Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and attempted to take control of the country.
Which every body knew was the last death throws of the Soviet empire. If they did not use the information then to turn the attention of the American, and world public, inward to their own governments lies and thus corruption and force it to ignore the events in the Soviet Union in order to deal with a damaging domestic and international issue. Then the proof of faked moon landings did not and never existed.
One final thought. After the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian economy tanked. People were selling all kinds of stuff owed by the crumbling state, ships, weapons, artworks and knowledge but nobody ever approached any Western news agency or tabloid to sell them this information. And to say that one would buy it but not publish is foolish. The seller could just keep peddling it until some on did and then it would be old news and worthless until then it would still be worth something.
Cool, any UFOs? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Cool, any UFOs? (Score:5, Funny)
No, these are just the "Special Edition" version of the faked moon landing tapes. It was "produced" by Lucas Films, in collaboration with NASA, and contain newly added footage and CGI-enhanced visuals.
They look great, but some have already complained that the new tapes show Buzz Aldrin touching the surface first, which completely changes the character and motivation of the scene.
-dZ.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They look great, but some have already complained that the new tapes show Buzz Aldrin touching the surface first, which completely changes the character and motivation of the scene.
I can accept that, but what really ruined the tapes for me was the new extended musical sequence.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why do you think we are of an concern to them? Allegedy - Allegedy - the UFO just sat there at the edge of the crater for a while, then moved off once the astronauts came out. The aliens are not the ones concerned. So why would they be concerned about our ability to use chemical-based engines to reach our first orbital body if the travel between stars?
As for our government control, that Russian hacker who got arrested for breaking tin to NASA computers allegedly had recovered images with alien craft. Now fi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is jack and shit for evidence of intelligent alien life as of today. I'm sure the Russian hacker THOUGHT he could find images... where is the proof he did? Did he disseminate any of them? Any that cannot be easily dismissed as various atmospheric and interference phenomena? I mean, there are people who still think the moon images were faked, even though there hav
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Can we.... (Score:2)
actually now go around and start yelling at the top of our lungs "THEY FOUND THE TAPES!!!!!"
Re:Can we.... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes we can, however our parents will shout down the stairs for us to shut up.
Parent
Re:Can we.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Already exists - called the Karma bonus
Headline (Score:5, Funny)
Initially I thought the headline read "Nasa Has Lost the Tapes", and I almost believed it. "What? Already? They lost them again? Those idiots! ... oh wait."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Did NASA Hire Scotty? (Score:2)
"We've lost the tapes." "No, sir, we've found the tapes after all."
Lost Tapes (Score:5, Funny)
Moonwalk? (Score:2, Funny)
Clearly the first moonwalk was done by Michael Jackson, we saw it live on television
Glad to hear that (Score:5, Insightful)
but why do they find the lunar tapes a few days before the 40th celebration of the Lunar mission (Apollo 11).
Is this a coincidence or PR?
Re:Glad to hear that (Score:5, Informative)
Coincidence. The search kicked off at least seven years ago [honeysucklecreek.net], when an ex-Honeysuckle Creek employee discovered an old tape in his garage. It was sent for analysis, in the hope that high resolution video of the Apollo 11 landing could be recovered. The tape turned out not to be of the moon landing. It did prompt people to ask "what happened to the originals", and kicked off a serious search. It turned out that NASA has misplaced their own copies.
Copies of the telemetry tapes (hundreds of them) were eventually discovered in the basement of the Physics building at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. They had been placed in the Uni's care by an Australian scientist (Brian O'Brien) who had run an Apollo experiment. He had the tapes as a record of the data from his own experiment, but by luck the telemetry stream includes everything, including the video. It turns out that Curtin Uni thought they weren't that important, on the basis that if they were important, NASA would have already had copies.
Parent
Here's to Packrats! (Score:3, Insightful)
3 Cheers for Packrats!
Nice Title (Score:2, Insightful)
Who has been to the Newseum? (Score:2)
I tried to go once, but it turned out that the tickets are $19 bucks.
Is it worth the price?
Decade of the remakes? (Score:5, Funny)
Now even this great movie of fiction gets a remake? Or will it just be a weak director's cut, to prepare for the lauch of the sequel "Mars mission"?
I hope it will have better props this time. They were pretty unrealistic, and clearly retouched (or 'shopped in 2009 speak) in that old movie.
In answer to your question (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it won't convince any of the idiots who think we never landed on the moon. No amount of evidence ever will.
Re:In answer to your question (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, we definitely landed on the moon, just not when NASA claimed.
Apollo 13 was the only mission to actually get there.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well the retroreflectors are there since they are still used for measurement purposes, but they could have been planted there by compliant aliens I guess...
NASA intentionally delayed ... (Score:5, Funny)
... release of the high resolution version until the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format issue was settled.
Don't fall for it (Score:3, Funny)
Future preservation plans? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Now, In the Background, Aliens Waving (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one nice and juicy little factoid. Consider how much mythology lives around these hidden tapes. There was no way for Nixon to be implicated in their tampering...
It's a neat mythology: if you believe the Moon Landing was faked, a hoax, then the soon-to-come high-def photos of the moon should answer that by showing the trash we left behind and that should still be there, the Lunar Landers. And if the landings are proven by the images to have actually occurred, then those same people can migrate to the idea that alien presences on the Moon were airbrushed out. Terrible tragedy it is for NASA that so many of their moon photos have obvious smudge marks over certain details. It would be nice to find out if those were alien ruins, waving aliens or just machine malfunctions
Re:Now, In the Background, Aliens Waving (Score:4, Informative)
If you believe the landing was faked, then the fact that the high-res tapes were found only after sophisticated digital photo-shop techniques were developed helps cement your belief.
Parent
Paradox alert (Score:4, Funny)
NASA doesn't have any lost tapes. If they have found them, they are by definition not lost anymore. I bet there are dozens of tapes that are lost because nobody knows their location but these tapes are not one of them. Correct headline would be "NASA has the found tapes". Sounds redundant? In the human mind that may be the case but if you think about it long enough, you can only come to this conclusion. Being lost is quite a fleeting and interesting feature and has no doubt been studied by filosophers around the ages.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, assuming the identifier 'Lost' is sufficient (given the context) is just leaving this story
More Anniversary Coverage (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there is also a piece on the hoax-spinners [nytimes.com].
Wired has a great article about the loss... (Score:5, Informative)
...here [wired.com]. Finding the tapes seemed nearly impossible at the time (2007) - the old reel-to-reel machines were dead, whole warehouses were being closed, and the people who were actually driving the recovery effort were mostly Apollo-class themselves - well into their golden years. It reminded me of some of the Library of Congress horror stories, only more desperate and with better special effects. If they do have the footage and can actually decode it, this is an amazing find - I wasn't holding out much hope.
Another cool site is Colin Mackellar's Honeysuckle Creek Tribute Site [honeysucklecreek.net]. Tons of info on the recording, the differences in quality, etc.
Really good news.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They can't reshoot it without Michael Jackson
oblig (Score:2)
Re:Greatly improved quality? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA.
This is the 320 mode. It's higher quality because the broadcast version was converted to standard TV by pointing a video camera at a screen showing the transmitted version.
Parent
Re:Greatly improved quality? (Score:5, Funny)
It's higher quality because the broadcast version was converted to standard TV by pointing a video camera at a screen showing the transmitted version.
I knew it! Those NASA bastards exploited the analog hole. Quick, get the MPAA on the phone and have somebody distract NewYorkCountryLawyer so he can't interfere. We finally have NASA right where we want them.....
Parent
Re:Greatly improved quality? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Greatly improved quality? (Score:5, Informative)
They pointed a TV camera at a monitor displaying the SSTV footage so it would be compatible with TV broadcasts, hence lower quality.
Parent
Re:Greatly improved quality? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
What was the scan resolution of a TV in 1969? Wikipedia says 262.5 lines per field. 320 > 262.5.
It's like going from youtube quality to HQ YouTube for free! (and a 50 year wait). We should get 640x(480?) resolution video, interlaced as a result. Who knows what the framerate will be - perhaps 30fps? I'm pretty sure the 8mm video that's been distributed was originally 24fps, and then degraded further to 30fps again. The moon video's motion might look different from what we see now.
Re:Greatly improved quality? (Score:4, Informative)
You're correct about NTSC not having a set horizontal resolution. Some could display upwards of 400 lines of horizontal resolution, but most TVs were designed with 320 +/- in mind. VCRs were lucky to get past 250; reason most stuff recorded on videotape appears excessively blurry. And one needs to think back to the early computer days in which the display and graphics were designed for existing TV-based CRT screen hardware.
In regards to the vertical resolution, some of the 262 lines are in the overscan area on CRT based monitors leaving about 240 lines viewable.
Ron
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
RTFA. Or for that matter, RT-previous-FA regarding the missing tapes. They are not claiming that these tapes are high-resolution or higher quality than current TV signals. They are claiming that they are higher quality than the images broadcast 40 years ago, and replayed often since.
The reason is that forty years ago these (slow-scan, lower resolution) tapes were broadcast by pointing a television camera to a display monitor, which was itself a television set. This greatly degraded the picture; but what
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We've sent probes down to the Marianas trench, so why aren't we living in bubbles down there? It's the same sort of question. Basically, because it's 'king hard to do still.
Apollo was *unbelievably* expensive (now adjust for inflation!) to achieve and had ENORMOUS political backing... but well... not very much in terms of science got done (engineering, sure, but science? Not so much). We can now do that science *MUCH* better from, say, the International Space Station, Hubble or the Mars Rovers. There's
Re:if you believe.. they put a man on the moon.. (Score:5, Informative)
In 1969 the Americans first landed men on the moon. Now some people have made names for themselves by saying that this and subsequent landings never happened. Their position is that NASA faked them in order to save face and fool the public. To prove their point they rely on explanations of the reported events using dubious science and lay explanations that any first year science major would and does, laugh at.
However, they always miss or purposely avoid the the one piece of irrefutable proof that it did in fact happen. That is that the Soviet government never refuted the American claims and they were in a unique position to do so. For even after the Americans landed on the moon the Soviets still continued to send orbiters, landers and rovers to the moon.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_planetary_lunar.html [russianspaceweb.com]
Now if they wanted to get the goods on the Americans all they had to do was to land, photograph or explore with a rover the American landing sights. Just imagine the embarrassment not to mention the the damage to American credibility, at the height of the cold war no less, that such information would generate. Records even show that they never landed or even explored that areas that that American landings happened. So they did not even go and look to make sure because they knew it really happened.
But they did not. They did not use it to pressure the Americans to stop bombing North Vietnam and Cambodia where Soviet military advisers were being killed as a result. They did not use it to pressure the United States to stop sending military advisers to and providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan fighters during the Soviet occupation. They did not use it to stop the Star Wars program of the Regan administration.
In fact they did not even use it to turn the West's attention away from the Soviet Union during the Soviet Coup of 1991 when members of the Soviet government briefly deposed Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and attempted to take control of the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_coup_attempt_of_1991 [wikipedia.org]
Which every body knew was the last death throws of the Soviet empire. If they did not use the information then to turn the attention of the American, and world public, inward to their own governments lies and thus corruption and force it to ignore the events in the Soviet Union in order to deal with a damaging domestic and international issue. Then the proof of faked moon landings did not and never existed.
One final thought. After the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian economy tanked. People were selling all kinds of stuff owed by the crumbling state, ships, weapons, artworks and knowledge but nobody ever approached any Western news agency or tabloid to sell them this information. And to say that one would buy it but not publish is foolish. The seller could just keep peddling it until some on did and then it would be old news and worthless until then it would still be worth something.
Parent