NASA Has the Lost Tapes 256
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.'"
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.
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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.
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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
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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
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"There is jack and shit for evidence of intelligent alien life as of today"
Then explain us, fool. Life is hard-coded into the mathematical fabric of the universe. If there were even a single bacterium on another planet parsecs away, your exactly-quoted sentence just went to hell in a handbasket, because we would be the intelligent alien life to it, respectively.
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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.
Re:Can we.... (Score:5, Funny)
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It's not a basement! It's a command center!
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Already exists - called the Karma bonus
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Not a good idea if you're in DC....
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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."
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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)
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And I still don't know what that frigging black smoke was!! God damn it, that show irritated the shit out of me...
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.
Here's to Packrats! (Score:3, Insightful)
3 Cheers for Packrats!
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NASA _needs_ a good PR department, especially since they have to fight for budget dollars. They don't have a special interests group to lobby for science after all.
Nice Title (Score:2, Insightful)
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How about "NASA has Found the Lost Tapes"? Right now the title tells me that NASA is in ownership of the tapes, but just can't find them.
Well if you're going to be pedantic, on slashdot the correct title would be "NASA can haz Lost Tapes pleaz?"
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You truly mustn't have a life. I'm not stressed by fat jokes. I've endured them for as long as I can remember. I'm laughing at you. You literally have nothing better to do than hold a grudge over a conversation from days ago and amuse yourself trying to annoy people. That makes you a complete joke.
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?
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Well, it does bring up the interesting question of why they're not doing it at the publicly-funded Smithsonian Air & Space museum across the street.
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.
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It's not any different from the original.
Yes it is! In the original, Neil shot first!
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Exciting News (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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What's it like to not have your moon, America? Our European moon is lovely. It's a shame God wanted your race destroyed by throwing your moon at you.
Sincerely,
Every American citizen who thinks the Simpsons is real.
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The landing site is visible from the earth with a telescope strong enough. Either they were there, or they sent something there when they said they were there. The cost and effort of a hoax that required the exact same effort of actually doing it is insane.
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ORLY? You should let NASA borrow your telescope then, because they don't have one strong enough [nasa.gov].
And that's how a Big Lie gets believed: someone makes a plausible sounding claim in a confident, dismissive manner, and nobody calls them on their bullshit. You, Sir, are Called.
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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)
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Same way most data reaches the general public [thepiratebay.org]
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PROSSER: The plans were on display--
ARTHUR: On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them!
PROSSER: That's the display department!
ARTHUR: With a flashlight.
PROSSER: The lights had probably gone out.
ARTHUR: So had the stairs.
PROSSER: But you found the notice, didn't you?
ARTHUR: Yes, I did. It was "on display" in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, "Beware of the Leopard."
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I don't know.
(sorry, your comment just looked really interrogative)
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.
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The "high definition" is relative. Later Apollo's had much better resolution, largely because they took a movie camera to the moon and brought it back to be developed rather than send live TV alone. The Apollo 11 footage is primarily of historical significance, being the first. Later missions also used color TV, unlike 11's B&W (although Apollo 12 accidentally ruined their TV camera
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.
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Of course, assuming the identifier 'Lost' is sufficient (given the context) is just leaving this story
petulant pedanticism (Score:2)
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.
And you know what, this is all completely obvious to anyone who never completed grade school. There's something about how grammar is first taught in elementary and junior school that leads to the kind of delayed-onset petulant pedanticism where someone regaining a "lost tape" is cited as logically inconsistent.
Any normal person makes the map from "lost tape" to "tape that was lost" a hundred times a day in the course of normal social relationships. Even people not regarded as representing the fat part of
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"Being lost is quite a fleeting and interesting feature and has no doubt been studied by filosophers around the ages."
I'm not a philosopher, but it seems to me that being lost is not so fleeting at all.
For example, if I misplace my keys, I could claim they are 'lost'. I could search for 10 seconds and find them, or I could search all week, or a month, or even a year before finding them. If I misplaced them well enough, I might -never- find them and they will be, forever, lost. Even if somebody else finds
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Legally, your keys are not "lost", they are "mislaid".
Things which are lost can become the property of a finder; things which are merely mislaid cannot. The difference is *whether they pass out of your personal control knowingly or not*. If you put your keys down, and can't remember where, or don't remember to take them, you've mislaid them. If they fall out of your pocket, they're lost.
A good example of this: if you find an iPod in a train seat, you can probably make a case for keeping it, legally. If
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But the misspelling made you think, and that's what philosophers like to due.
More Anniversary Coverage (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there is also a piece on the hoax-spinners [nytimes.com].
This may not be the lost tapes (Score:2)
Typographical error. (Score:2, Funny)
As speculated a few weeks ago, NASA has found and is starting to redact the lost Apollo 11 tapes.
There, fixed that for ya.
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.
Excellent, this is HD quality footage (Score:2, Redundant)
At WWDC this year (the Apple developer conference) they had a lunch speaker whose whole job was recovering video from tapes exactly like these. The resolution you can get from them is amazing, they are equivalent (or perhaps surpass) modern HD video cameras. One example was comparing a video pass over the moon to the same are taken with 35mm film, the result wasn't even close - the recovered video offered far more detail.
I am really looking forward to the footage from this.
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What irks me this week (Score:2)
Is that this is pretty close to the only video tape we're *going* to see:
if any of the networks are planning anything for the anniversary, they're doing an exceptional job keeping it under wraps.
Damnit; I wish Uncle Walter wasn't sick. He'd just show up and say "let's go", and who at CBS is gonna tell him "No"? They'll just assign him a camera crew and buy him plane tickets.
Yes yes yes (Score:2)
I've been reading about these found tapes for weeks, post the youtube link already!
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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.
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Re:Greatly improved quality? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Greatly improved quality? (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Presumably 320 is the horizontal resolution, and is about the max most older NTSC CRT TVs are capable of displaying; much of the reason 320x240 and resolution multiples thereof became widely common in computer video cards.
Ron
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I guess a reason 320 pixels was a common horizontal resolution for computers is that it's a multiple of 80, meaning 80-column text can be displayed with an integer number of pixels per character width. Also the fact that it's a multiple of various powers of two makes it convenient to represent a scanline as an integer number of bytes/words.
The reason for 240 vertical pixels is that with 320 horizo
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
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The CRT takes a continuous signal, but the effective horizontal resolution of a broadcast signal is limited by the 6MHz bandwidth of the channel; it's about 330 lines.
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The problem was not the lines, which, as you note, is roughly equivalent to broadcast TV's.
The problem was that the vision from the moon was slow scan - i.e. 10 frames per second (see http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/ [csiro.au] - a very good tale of the technical side of getting the signals back from the moon). The only way they had of converting that to the 50i or 60i signals of broadcast TV was a converter that basically consisted of a camera pointed at a long-phosphor CRT - although it was a si
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Yes, likely mislabeled and either destroyed or "permanently" stored. Some government agencies that I'll refrain from naming even let their stuff get trashed intentionally so that there are no questions when potentially valuable equipment is disposed of. I have terrible visions of these tapes sitting on a tarmac somewhere baking during the day and getting rained on for a couple of months before being degaussed, shredded, and incinerated.
Has anyone thought to check US Gov Crate #9906753? I hear there's goo
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Existing video is a Film recording of broadcast (Score:2)
Just one thing additional thing I learned from that document: It seems that all existing video is film of CRT screens displaying a live feed of the broadcast signals. So we have the scan conversion, which was lossy, and then the broadcast 60i (or 50i) to film (more lossage and noise), and then film - digital video (as little loss as possible). No wonder the video looks so horrid!
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Smoother, maybe faster or slower. 30fps -> 24 (maybe even 18! depends on the camera)fps -> 30fps -> whatever fps youtube uses, is going to result in slowdown/speedup depending on what algorithms were used when it was converted.
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Slow-scan TV or SSTV [wikipedia.org] is meant to be a narrowband transmission, only requiring about 3kHz according to the listing on wiki and it's FAR from high res.
so yea...dunno what they were smokin'
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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
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Read your own link...
Below is a table of some of the most common SSTV modes and their differences.
Not all known modes to have ever existed, earlier on in the wiki it says:
Vostok 2 and thereafter used an improved 400-line television system referred to as Topaz.
Which was in 1961 and after, and then related to this article:
The SSTV system used in NASA's early Apollo missions transferred ten frames per second with a resolution of 320 frame lines using less bandwidth than a normal TV transmission.
Just because it's a table, doesn't mean it includes all data, and just because it's in a table, doesn't mean the information is correct.
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The Space Shuttle.
It was a monster that consumed so much of NASA's budget since its inception that we couldn't afford to get back to the moon. If we'd just continued improving the Apollo technology then it probably would have gone on the same trajectory as the other technologies you mention and we'd be on Mars by now.
It seemed like a really good idea at the time, though.
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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
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But, you see, I found Abby Normal's brain more fascinating.
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.