NASA to Digitize its 50 Years of Photos and Films

Lucas123 writes "Putting the images and film online will allow NASA to more easily share and showcase its achievements, including photos from its Mars rover missions and from its manned and unmanned voyages to the Moon and beyond, according to Computerworld's Todd Weiss. Much of NASA's archived photos and film is currently divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories, making it hard to find specific images or archives unless a user knows exactly where it is. "Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released," according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs."

Re:Anyone called...

[cabinetsoft]

Anyone called...Google yet?

Yeh... got this on the other end "The frequency spectrum you have dialed hasn't been granted to us yet"

Digitizing makes it easier to lose

[alcmaeon]

This should make it much easier for NASA to lose priceless historical data than having to lose hundreds of physical tapes. Losing all data will be just a reformat away now. They just have to remember to not back up which shouldn't be too hard.

Re:

[andy_t_roo]

"This should make it much easier for NASA to lose priceless historical data ... " you mean items like the original Apollo 13 moonwalk tapes?

A good investment

[thc69]

Sounds like a good investment in marketing, an attempt to please the public so there will be more interest in NASA and more funding. Will it work?

Re:A good investment

[DerekLyons]

Sounds like a good investment in marketing, an attempt to please the public so there will be more interest in NASA and more funding. Will it work?

Nope. Mostly because the segment of the public that will actually be impressed by this isn't large enough to be noticeable (politically).
 
Well, maybe they would constitute a majority is some remote county in Montana.

Re:

[mh1997]

Sounds like a good investment in marketing, an attempt to please the public so there will be more interest in NASA and more funding. Will it work?

Yes, as soon as they find the 8-inch - SSSD IBM 33FD compatible disk drive so that they can access the files.

Re:

[HalifaxRage]

You've got it all wrong, man. The Americans went to the moon, right. But they were beaten by the Nazis. They got up there and found Adolf and his third Reich buddies who shot Kennedy from behind the knoll.

Re:

[H0D_G]

Space Nazis are the most evil conspiracy ever! I blame them directly for the TV show big brother. pure evil!

Good Publicity

[Boa Constrictor]

It's nice to see something positive about NASA, I expect they're still fighting pretty hard to remain relevant to the US taxpayer. Furthermore, the whole "drunken astronauts" debacle didn't show them off in a good light. NASA is, of course, a huge financial black hole (sorry) in itself, but the spin-off products work their way into consumer sectors, so it's important that funding continues. With enough strains on the US government (sub-prime morgages leading to market damage, the odd war here and there) it will be harder than ever to justify something like this with few immediate results.

Re:Good Publicity

[canuck57]

With enough strains on the US government (sub-prime morgages leading to market damage, the odd war here and there) it will be harder than ever to justify something like this with few immediate results.

Just think, if we traded a never ending war for NASA, how much money we would save and get space flight too?

For mortgages, no big. Let the low cost lenders take the bite. Part of what is wrong here is the government spends too much money in all the wrong places and everyone expects the government to bail out banks who lent money at a rate not reflecting risk. Let the market correct I say.

If you really want more people into science, get more science; base your economy on science and not war and corporate welfare.

Tears don't flow the same in space

[toddhisattva]

Just think, if we traded a never ending war for NASA, how much money we would save and get space flight too?

Just like NASA tech spins off into consumer goodies, acts of terrorism cause economic tsunamis in consumer space. Oh and they kill people too.

We've been some 2176 days since a terrorist attack on the mainland.

It's a big, big interconnected world, in which exists asymmetrical warfare and a news media that recruits for the terrorists.

So by not funding the war, we will probably lose money and nobody will care about space flight.

Insurance premiums will rise to cover the direct financial losses, oh and that de

Re:Good Publicity

[AsnFkr]

NASA is, of course, a huge financial black hole (sorry) in itself,

A large portion of that money is dumped right back into the US economy via NASA paying private sector contractors to do development and production of their many needs. All of the money doesn't just vanish.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. It's adorable how the same people who just love military funding bitch and moan about NASA. Fucking morons.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps to consider that a society only can produce so many goods or services. How these are allocated is the salient point. As a simple example, assume the government of a society can pay a contractor to produce weapons, spaceships, or farming tools. The first option, weapons, doesn't help society in the short-term or the long-term. The second option, spaceships, doesn't help society in the short-term, but the research done might allow for some technological advances in the long-term. The third optio

Re:

[Logic and Reason]

Sigh.

That's the same thinking that makes people believe it "helps the economy" when the government pays people to dig ditches all day and then fill them in at night. That the wages go "back into" the economy does not contradict the fact that it's a huge waste of the public's money.

Now, I'm not saying that what NASA does is necessarily a waste of funds (though it is, compared with how cheaply private firms could be doing it); but your reasoning is faulty. Not that you're alone in that regard...

Re:Good Publicity

[lenehey]

Lets keep it in perspective. NASA's FY 2007 budge was about $17.310 Billion [thebudgetgraph.com] out of a $2.8 trillion total [wikipedia.org] budget. That means that NASA represents about 0.6% of the federal budge. Compare this to the $699 billion defense budge or even the $27 billion expended for agriculture, and you can see where our priorities lie. There were about 133 million [irs.gov] individual tax returns filed last year. Therefore On a per individual tax payer basis, NASA's budget represents a cost average of about $130 per individual taxpayer (not including corporations) per year. Compare this to the defense budget to works out to about $5,250/year.

Re:

[UbuntuDupe]

Yeah, that's a tough call.

a) Bail out lenders who made crappy loans and idiot speculators (scalpers, actually) who took mortgages they couldn't afford, in the process making living costs surge.

or

b) Space exploration.

(Now replace a) with "Iraq War"!)

Re:

[F4_W_weasel]

One must say that, Any Space Agency is such and endevour that it deserve a little respect for some of it's work and achievements. Despite all the talk about NASA military ties, budget, mistakes, there's a good sense that NASA and EASA are really helping us find our size and place on this present universe. Cheers for NASA ( and all the good people ) that contributes with more JPGs for our wallpaper collections. Would buy a DVD if they ever release one with that DATA. keep up the good work folks.

Re:

[_Hellfire_]

...the odd war here and there...

You do realise that the US has been at war with someone or other, non-stop, since Korea in the 1950's don't you?

Re:

[CriX]

Every NASA dollar is spent right here on Earth. Gah, your post is so infuriating to me! How do you put a price tag on inspiration? You would prefer to live in a world where we hadn't decided to go to the moon or create an amazing space station? It's a damn good investment and if we took a couple percent off what the military gets then NASA could do even more.

Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[purduephotog]

The first time NASA scanned a bunch of old chromes they used Kodak's HR-500 scanner. I got in on the end of that, after all the work had been done and (unfortunately for the world) after all the images had been rendered to 8-bit JPG/tiff files.

I'd hope the contacts I put in place could talk to each other and do it right (extended bit depth scanning, custom raw image processing) but since my old group at Kodak has been gutted to 1 person (a supervisor with no direct reports) and the building that housed all the scanning knowledge and equipment is being torn down... I somehow doubt it.

Once again, the world loses out in terms of better images holding more information.

Not that I don't think NASA will do their best- they just didn't have access to the kinds of equipment and the low-level software interface to allow the levels of high precision I'm talking about.

Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[north.coaster]

If they use the similar technology to what they are using here [slashdot.org] then it may turn out better than you expect.

Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[purduephotog]

OOOOooh I missed that post.

One thing that they (wrongly) state is that 16 bit is better than 8 bit. Yes- it shows more grey levels. But it doesn't show more DENSITY levels. That's the problem when people scan various films- film can have a tremendous density range (3.8 or so), and when you capture that much range you get images that look pathetic. They then have to be rendered down to a human-pleasing visual curve- S curve- and then what you see is something nice.

Every scanner on the market scans for an 8 bit 'S-Curve' with more grey levels (10, 12, 14, etc). Most can't/won't give you access to the raw transmission data (density = 1/transmission). I'll have to see if I can't get my old tutorial on the differences, but if you have 12 bit 'raw' density (linear corrected, of course- so greys track grey) then you can use specialized algorithms or dodging and burning to adjust the image, bring shadows up, bring highlights down, restore detail, change localized contrast- THEN YOU RENDER IT to 8 bit (or 10 or 12 bit) with the appropriate human-pleasing S-Curve.

I'm probably not making alot of sense because there are very few people out there that understand fundamentally that every scanner, 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 bit, is really throwing away a TON of the data on your film... and it's scanning it in such a way that you miss out on all that information, permanently.

But I was always picky like that.

Re:

[jguthrie]

Although your words parse and pass semantic analysis, I don't understand how an exact representation of an image can be any less pleasing than the image itself. I mean, I understand that my understanding is limited by the background I don't have, but examples or a tutorial would be helpful.

High Dynamic Range Imaging

[purduephotog]

Try these links-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_im aging [wikipedia.org]

A very good one here - the original authority on the matter-
http://www.debevec.org/Research/HDR/ [debevec.org]

Some technical research (with good examples and clips)
http://www.anyhere.com/gward/hdrenc/hdr_encodings. html [anyhere.com]

Does that help? Probably should have included it in my earlier post.

Re:

[bloosqr]

The "S" curve means .. we like things contrasty ... that is we like our darks dark and our lights light .. There is a lot of information in the "darks/lights" the scanner records, but the eye normally doesn't care because by squishing the darks and lights i.e. making it contrasty .. things "jump" out at you.. That said even w/ the concept, as the parent said, its best to scan at the highest bit depth you have .. because what it lets you do is make the parts you are interested in "contrasty" .. its lik

Re:Kodak, the HR-500, and NASA

[JackHoffman]

The problem isn't the image data but the way it's presented to you. A normal computer monitor has a very limited dynamic range (compared to the real world). So does a paper print. Your eyes expect a certain contrast between parts of an image. If that contrast isn't there, the image looks dull and appears to lack detail. Now take a picture with a natural dynamic range that far exceeds what a monitor can recreate (just about any picture you take outside. The dynamic range is even greater in space due to the lack of atmosphere). If you map the brightest spot in that image to white on your monitor and the darkest to black, then you get a washed out image, because the original contrast is compressed to the maximum contrast that your monitor can produce. One bright highlight in the full range data means that another area in the picture which would normally be mapped to white is now a medium gray or less on the computer screen.

Re:

[networkBoy]

Cibachrome. The one and only paper print that can produce a dMax of 3.9.
Alas, it is horrifically expensive, and I know of only a couple of print houses in the world that still do it (not sure if the "paper" is even still made).
-nB

Re:

[KlaymenDK]

But I was always picky like that.

Tahaha, sweet last sentence. Reminds me of the "therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man". :-p

The world needs unreasonable nerds such as you ... and me. ;)

Re:

[t3h_donkey]

I just started working for Kodak in the Document Imaging group a few weeks ago. They're responsible for developing all of Kodak's scanners. I assume that includes film scanners but I'm not sure. I don't know which team you were a part of but DI is most definitely not getting stripped down. They just moved to a really nice building back in April which is probably why they're able to knock down the old one. Being new around here, I'm still not very familiar with most of their products but the high end on

Re:

[t3h_donkey]

Oh, I forgot to mention that I believe at least their high end products scan in 16 bits per channel. But once again, I'm new here and don't know too many details yet. I'm not sure why you make it sound like there's little to no difference between scanning in 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 bits though. You're obviously limited by the dynamic range of both the camera and paper/negative/film but 16 bits gives you much finer granularity and, assuming you can capture a higher dynamic range than a monitor can display, y

NASA's Greatest Hits

[Doc Ruby]

NASA should collect some hilights of its collection and distribute them on DVD to every American. They should mail out a little book with color photos and URLs, with a DVD of what Americans pay NASA to do.

They should hire some people from AOL with the experience in those mass disc mailings. To reduce waste, NASA should include a return envelope with return postage for people who don't want it. And once the DVDs are distributed, NASA should show a TV series on PBS featuring some DVD content along with other material only shown on the TV premiere. Then NASA should sell additional content, including the TV show.

Even if NASA spends as much as AOL spends to spam us with discs, it will be worth every penny. Americans love NASA when we see it on out TVs. It's consistently among the most valued and inspiring government programmes. It's always giving us "free science" that's consistently improving our lives. If NASA just put more of that inspiration in our hands, it wouldn't have to scrape for cash and whore itself to non-science agencies nearly as much.

We deserve NASA. And NASA deserves our appreciation. If it just got sexed up a little more, especially now that shuttle launches are infrequent, winding down, and so often dramas of failure, packaging the science in handy consumer toys would reconnect us with some of our greatest successes.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because that would be an excellent use of the funding that NASA fights to get...

Here's a better idea - take some of that $500,000,000,000+ ANNUAL defense budget and reprioritize some of that into USEFUL things, such as NASA.

On a side note, I was watching The Dream Is Alive [wikipedia.org] last night and it was humorous to see how optimistic about space travel we were a mere 20 years ago. Comments like how our grandchildren will be born in space (remember that this was made one generation back, so they're saying

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

Yes, it would be an excellent use of the $16B NASA gets. It would probably cost about $100M or less, under 0.625% of its annual budget. Which would be an investment in getting more budget. If promoting its triumph to Americans can't get a 0.625% return on our investment, then it either needs more invested, or the system is incapable of serving all Americans. Which is a failure of the system, because there's no doubt that Americans would like the programmes more than 0.625% additional with some tangible resu

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you honestly believe that they can do a project like that for less than 33 cents per person? You've never dealt with any sort of direct marketing, have you? Minimum cost for a project like this is about 2 bucks per (which is doing it on the cheap), which comes in at over half a billion dollars, or a little more than 3% of their annual budget. As I said, there are other much more economical ways to get funding than spending a small fortune on a direct mail campaign that most people will simply ignore.

Si

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

We'd only have to send out 100M discs to send one to each home, not to each individual person. And since we'd send them with the return postage/address, and some fraction of people would send them back, we wouldn't even be sending 100M.

I have in fact been part of a direct marketing (mail) campaign. I helped BBDO in Canada switch from direct mail for Visa cards, at $2.50 per "impression", to Web marketing, by first participating in the postal version. Most of that $2.50 was in the rest of the campaign, not t

Re:

[maxume]

Or, instead of spending the quarter or half billion dollars that you propose(or do you think it will really cost less than $1 per person?), they could just liberalize whatever media policy they have(or do they already have a pretty open media policy?) and let greedy bastards and wanton consumers do their thing.

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

Yes, I think that distributing the discs to 100M homes will cost <$1 each. AOL sent something like a BILLION CDs [wikipedia.org]. Though they were successful, I don't think they spent over a $BILLION sending them. And they didn't send them to every American in one operation, while production costs were as low as now, nor did they get "wholesale" government postage rates or other economies of the scale this operation would have.

We Americans have already paid to produce this content. There's plenty of it available for cor

Re:

[Teancum]

I would like to point out that the NASA Public Relations budget is easily close to this price alone. I would rather that NASA spent that kind of money on some worthy project like this that put the data into the hands of those that have helped pay for all of this rather than on some other equally foolish endeavor that is easily going to squander many times more money. Like the Ares spacecraft.

As far as open media policy, I can't imagine anybody who is more open than NASA. They have placed everything, incl

Re:

[susano_otter]

By law, everything NASA does is open to the public. The practical restrictions are typically archiving cost, distribution cost, and often agreements with sponsoring organizations. It's common for a scientific research organization such as a university to get exclusive rights for a few months to the raw data they sponsored, in order to complete their research and publish their results before the raw data is made public. Once the moratorium has passed, though, the data is made public.

All you have to do to ge

Re:

[maxume]

What if I want to film mission control? That's more what I meant about media policy.

I get that most federally generated information is in the public domain, but that doesn't mean it is all that available(or even advertised as existing).

Re:

[susano_otter]

Mission Control is filmed, and streamed live over the Internet. I watched the landing of STS-118 (the latest Space Shuttle mission) this way last week. Look up "NASA TV". There's also transcripts and replays, and you can probably request copies of the video footage from NASA, either by writing to them or filing an FOIA request. You obviously have an Internet connection, and you claim to have some interest in getting information about NASA's activities. How much time have you actually spent exploring NASA

Re:

[maxume]

If you are going to claim that I did, you might as well point out exactly where I expressed an interest in getting information about NASA or complained about their current policies.

All I did was point out that sending 99 million households a DVD they probably don't want(or have at the most a vanishingly small interest in) is a bad way for NASA to spend money. Your explanation of exactly how far they already go to share information reinforces my point. I guess I also pointed out that you had misinterpreted t

Re:

[kimvette]

Why send out physical DVDs when this is an ideal problem for bittorrent to solve?

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

Because most American homes don't have BitTorrent, or broadband connections, or the savvy to use BitTorrent.

NASA could seed BitTorrent with a version that includes an "opt-out" from the postal delivery. That might cover a few hundred thousand homes out of the 100M in America. But I expect that lots of BitTorrent enthusiasts would also want to collect the "official release" on physical media, including the book that anyone can look at without using a computer.

But BitTorrent could save a bit of work, trees an

Waitaminnit!

[Infonaut]

Because most American homes don't have BitTorrent, or broadband connections, or the savvy to use BitTorrent.

That's tantamount to saying that the Slashdot demographic is wildly out of synch with most of America! ;-)

Saturn V blueprints?

[starseeker]

I don't suppose the engineering geeks among us will now get to see and search through online the complete Mercury, Gemini, Saturn V, etc. blueprints hidden away in physical archives? I expect that sort of material doesn't qualify for what they're doing now but it would be really nice to have that information preserved electronically and publicly. Especially the Saturn V - that's probably as close as modern civilization will ever get to something like pyramid building. Right now, if the records are still

Re:

[ILuvRamen]

We can't go to the moon huh? Oh so you're one of THOSE people. Okay so then how did the mirror reflector station that we still bounce lasers off of today get there and set up if we never landed there?

Re:

[niteice]

I don't suppose the Russian government still has the blueprints for the N-1 lying around

Maybe they do, but how are we supposed to replicate its shoddy construction and ensuing ability to explode at random moments?

behind?

[Montusama]

Why aren't they digitalized already? NASA of all people should have the money and technology to digitalized everything they have produced in their lifetime. Computers have been around a while, its what got us up into space (take it we have more powerful calculators than those computers......). I can understand older photographs and films being on film but shouldn't newer photos be all digital anyways?

Harder than you think

[Teancum]

Digitized into what multi-media format, at what bit depth and resolution, and is it a lossy or non-lossy compression?

Digital media formats are not nearly as "standardized" as you would seem to indicate here, and such multimedia computers have not "been around a while". Certainly not the computers that "got us up into space".

In addition, even those photos which were originally done as digitized data (aka the interplanetary space probes) have all had virtually incompatible file formats from even each other, much less even from traditional web media formats like PNG, GIF, or JPEG.

On top of all of this is the sheer volume of data available that can be digitized and made available. We are not talking just a couple hundred photos here that tend to hit the cover of National Geographic, but literally millions of photos. Earth observation photos bring in tens of thousands of photos each day on just a single satellite.

Even now, I question the ability of digital cameras to capture the saturation, dynamic color depth, resolution, and other optical characteristics found with analog film. Certainly digital cameras are getting better and better, but there is room for improvement well beyond what exists even now. Over time, digital cameras may be even superior to analog photographic techniques in most situations, but it won't get rid of all of the problems.

In short, I think that you have trivialized some very real and tough problems here involved with both cataloging as well as simply dititizing these photos, not to mention other multi-media data like audio and video.

Re:

[forrestt]

We are in the process if digitizing almost every document ever produced (since the NACA days even). This is a lot more data than you would expect. You can find the publicly available documents at http://ntrs.nasa.gov./ [ntrs.nasa.gov] The problem isn't the physical ability to scan documents, but rather the manpower required to verify the images scanned in are accurate and that various pieces of metadata are collected accurately (for example, Author name or Title, which can be found in 100's of places within a document).

Re:

[sokoban]

I hope so. I would love it if they put them out on DVD with a commentary track by the director, actors, and the SFX guy.

YES!!!

[c6gunner]

"Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released," according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs."

Finally! After all these years, they're FINALLY going to show us how they faked the moon landing!!!

Re:YES!!!

[r33per]

they're FINALLY going to show us how they faked the moon landing!!!

BONUS MATERIAL

> Meet the film crew
> Audio Commentary with Director of Photography
> Deleted Scenes - inc. Alien Autopsy
> Gag Reel
> Cast Interviews

Moon Landings

[DanMelks]

Does this mean they will also digitize the lost moon tapes?

categories

[Anonymous Coward]

"Much of NASA's archived photos and film is currently divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories"

1. Things we know are lost.
2. Things we know we had, but don't realize are lost.
3. Things we forgot we had, and don't realize are lost.
.....
20. Various snapshots of the Blastoff-eve party (redacted).

Gamma Rays

[king-manic]

I eagerly await the arrival of either the Hulk or godzilla.

I KNEW IT!

[Chabil Ha']

"Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released..."

Who cares whether we landed on the moon or not! After all these years they're finally going to release the findings from their sex experiments in space [about.com]!

Missing Apollo 11 tapes

[Mabelyne]

I wonder just how and when NASA is going to digitize the missing Apollo 11 tapes. Should prove interesting, the methodology they plan to use for those!