121-499: The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project ( LOIRP ) was a project to digitize the original analog data tapes from the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that were sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967; it was funded by NASA , SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and private individuals. The first image to be successfully recovered by the project was released in November 2008. It was the first photograph of
242-487: A mu-metal tin, and sealed with yellow plastic tape. Additional labels have been placed on the outside of the tape container. Each tape is labeled with a code that usually consists of two letters and two numbers, for example: MT_19, WT_45, and GT_46. One of the Astrobiology Academy students realized that the first letter indicated which ground station recorded the data on the tape in that container: "M" indicates that
363-441: A blog, Dennis Wingo said, "I cannot tell you how many times we have heard similar stories of recently tossed manuals over the last six months". At just the right moment the team heard from a friend of a friend that a mother lode of maintenance documentation stored on aperture cards (microfilm embedded in computer punch cards) had been saved by the retired head of Ampex field engineering. This documentation would make it possible for
484-482: A change which provided vastly improved resolution over the original images released in the 1960s. The first of these restored images were released in late 2008. Almost all of the Lunar Orbiter images had been successfully recovered As of February 2014 and were undergoing digital processing before being submitted to NASA's Planetary Data System . The above links lead to a whole book on the Lunar Orbiter program. For
605-406: A few for In-flight entertainment . The VR-1500 and VR-660 found service at educational institutions especially due to their relatively low cost vs. 2-inch (51 mm) quadruplex VTRs. These machines were simple to operate, reliable, small in size—and produced, for their time, very good video without the complexity of the larger and much more complex 2" Quad machines. In March 1967, Ampex introduced
726-507: A film processing unit, a readout scanner, and a film handling apparatus. Both lenses, a 610 mm (24 in) narrow angle high resolution (HR) lens and an 80 mm (3.1 in) wide angle medium resolution (MR) lens, placed their frame exposures on a single roll of 70 mm film . The axes of the two cameras were coincident so the area imaged in the HR frames were centered within the MR frame areas. The film
847-544: A frame accurate timing computer that enabled frame-accurate cuts and dissolve transitions by way of a two-input video switcher. Slow-motion sequences could likewise be programmed and could be "triggered" to begin via an external control pulse such as might come from an external VTR editor like the Ampex VR-2000 VTR with Editec. The HS-200 was the first system capable of single-frame video animation recording, using magnetic discs as opposed to videotape. The HS-200 also provided
968-507: A high-fidelity movie sound system using sound magnetically recorded on the film itself, as contrasted with the technology of the time, which used magnetic tracks on a separate celluloid base film (later commonly known as mag stock). The result of this development was the CinemaScope / Todd-AO motion picture sound system, which was first used in movies such as The Robe (1953) in 35mm and Oklahoma (1955) in 70mm (and also in 35mm). In 1960,
1089-452: A huge impact on developments the whole video signal chain. They did rebadge some specialist low-volume OEM products to complete the package, but their in-house teams developed industry leading products in the following categories: ADO – Ampex Digital Optics provided comprehensive frame manipulation in 2 and 3 dimensions. Adjusting the aspect, size, and rotation of the image was performed continuously in real-time. An optional digital 'combiner'
1210-461: A laboratory and hub for the company's line of industrial control systems, cyber security products and services and its artificial intelligence / machine learning technology. Ampex's first great success was a line of reel-to-reel tape recorders developed from the German wartime Magnetophon system at the behest of Bing Crosby . Ampex quickly became a leader in audio tape technology, developing many of
1331-641: A major restoration of the drives and to create the demodulation hardware needed for the other tapes. Gregory Schmidt, deputy director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute at Ames said, "Now that we've demonstrated the capability to retrieve images, our goal is to complete the tape drives' restoration and move toward retrieving all of the images on the remaining tapes". Within a month, the next round of funding came through and restoration began in earnest. The heads, capstan and rotor motors were being restored by two different companies. New documentation about
SECTION 10
#17330862882541452-594: A new visitor to McMoon's, such as Dr. Lisa Gaddis from the USGS project to digitize the Lunar Orbiter films, and Charlie Byrne, who wrote the memo recommending that the Lunar Orbiter data be stored on magnetic tape. The project was reported in the Los Angeles Times , Computerworld , National Geographic , the Associated Press , American Libraries , the local news, and numerous blogs. Included in every news story
1573-423: A pallet of manuals and schematics for the tape drives, along with hard copies of data related to the lunar images. Meanwhile, the tapes were stored safely in a climate-controlled warehouse. There were about 1,500 tapes, all packed into boxes, stacked four deep on pallets, and shrink-wrapped. Wingo and Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and president of SpaceRef Interactive, respectively, now served as co-leaders of
1694-498: A readout with specific frame numbers showing from the 900 frames available (NTSC version). Sequences could be triggered to start from any of these 900 frames with frame-accurate repeatability for creative fine tuning of sequence start and end points. 1 inch type A videotape (designated Type A by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, SMPTE ) was an open-reel helical scan videotape format developed by Ampex in 1965, one of
1815-559: A semidry process. The subsystem's photomultiplier then scanned the images by a for transmission to Earth as analog video . The receiving stations on Earth then transferred the video images back onto film, which was then shipped to Kodak in Rochester for final processing and printing. This system was adapted under permission of the NRO from the SAMOS E-1 reconnaissance camera, built by Kodak for
1936-524: A separate warehouse. On the other hand, the former McDonald's was much larger, had good lighting, adequate power, air conditioning, and parking. The building turned out to need some improvements in the electrical wiring. By July 2008, the team had moved into the former McDonald's (Building 596), now dubbed "McMoon's". Wingo and Cowing quickly found more expertise in Ken Zin, a U.S. Army veteran who had long experience in working with analog tape machines, including
2057-605: A short-lived USAF near-realtime satellite imaging project. As a backup for the Lunar Orbiter program, NASA and the NRO cooperated on the Lunar Mapping and Survey System (LM&SS), based on the KH-7 reconnaissance satellite. Replacing the Lunar Module in the Saturn V , Apollo astronauts would operate LM&SS remotely in lunar orbit. NASA canceled the project in the summer of 1967 after
2178-631: A spinning head and relatively slow-moving tape. In early 1956, a team produced the first videotape recorder. A young, 19-year-old engineer Ray Dolby was also part of the team. Ampex demonstrated the VR-1000 , which was the first of Ampex's line of 2-inch Quadruplex videotape recorders on April 14, 1956, at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters in Chicago. The first magnetically recorded time-delayed television network program using
2299-410: A tape, which, from the audio clip at the start, sounded as if it contained a demodulated recording of one of the images. This was a lucky break, as it meant that a demodulator would not be needed to generate images from this tape. If the team could rescue this image, the project would prove "that the drive can be refurbished to the point of reliably playing a tape back". Work continued, and the team coined
2420-478: A total cost of roughly $ 200 million. Doppler tracking of the five orbiters allowed mapping of the gravitational field of the Moon and discovery of mass concentrations (mascons), or gravitational highs, which were located in the centers of some (but not all) of the lunar maria. Below is the flight log information of the five Lunar Orbiter photographic missions: The Lunar Orbiter orbital photographs were transmitted to Earth as analog data after onboard scanning of
2541-476: A total of 12 Emmys for its technical video achievements. In 1959, Richard Nixon , then Vice President, and Nikita Khrushchev held discussions at the Moscow Trade Fair, which became known as the " Kitchen Debate " because they were mostly held in the kitchen of a suburban model house. These discussions were recorded on an Ampex color videotape recorder, and during the debate Nixon pointed this out as one of
SECTION 20
#17330862882542662-482: A trip to Radio Frankfurt. The device produced much better fidelity than shellac records. The technological processes in tape recording and equipment developed by German companies before and during the 1939–1945 war were subject to patents which were effectively voided after Germany's 1945 surrender and defeat. Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders and 50 reels of BASF Type L tape, and brought them to America, where he produced modified versions. He demonstrated them to
2783-467: A wide-angle and a high-resolution image on the same film. The wide-angle, medium resolution mode used an 80 mm F 2.8 Xenotar lens manufactured by Schneider Kreuznach of West Germany. The high-resolution mode used a 610 mm F 5.6 Panoramic lens manufactured by the Pacific Optical Company. The cameras exposed negatives on 65 mm Kodak Bimat film, which was then developed onboard using
2904-780: Is 54 °C (129 °F) and a typical time is 16 hours") to attempt to recover such tapes, allowing them to be played once more and the recordings transferred to new media. The problems have been reported on tapes of type 406/407, 456/457, 2020/373. Ampex Records was started in 1970. Its biggest hit was "We Gotta Get You A Woman" by Todd Rundgren (as "Runt"), reaching No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1970. Ampex also originated three subsidiary labels: Bearsville , Big Tree , and Lizard. Ampex Records ceased operations around 1973; Bearsville and Big Tree switched distribution respectively to Warner Bros. Records and Bell Records , and Lizard became an independent entity. Later on, Big Tree
3025-517: Is a digital video tape format created by Ampex and other manufacturers (through a standards group of SMPTE) and introduced at the 1988 NAB ( National Association of Broadcasters ) convention as a lower-cost alternative to the D-1 format. Like D-1, D-2 video is uncompressed; however, it saves bandwidth and other costs by sampling a fully encoded NTSC or PAL composite video signal, and storing it directly to magnetic tape, rather than sampling component video. This
3146-419: Is attempting to do more with the data stored on its network attached storage (NAS) devices. This includes adding encryption for secure data storage; algorithms focused on control system cyber security for infrastructure and aerospace platforms; and artificial intelligence/machine learning for automated entity identification and data analytics. Russian–American inventor Alexander Matthew Poniatoff established
3267-598: Is known as digital composite. Digital Component Technology (DCT) and Data Storage Technology (DST) are VTR and data storage devices respectively, created by Ampex in 1992. Both were similar to the D1 and D2 VTR formats, using a 19-millimetre ( 3 ⁄ 4 in) width, with the DCT format using DCT ( discrete cosine transform ) video compression , also its namesake. The DCT and DST formats yielded relatively high capacity and speed for data and video. Double-density DST data storage
3388-506: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ampex an Oscar for technical achievement as a result of this development. Les Paul , a friend of Crosby and a regular guest on his shows, had already been experimenting with overdubbed recordings on disc. He received an early portable Ampex Model 300 from Crosby. Using this machine, Les Paul invented "Sound on Sound" recording technology. He placed an additional playback head, located before
3509-559: The Institute of Radio Engineers in San Francisco on May 16, 1946. Bing Crosby , a big star on radio at the time, was receptive to the idea of pre-recording his radio programs. He disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts, and much preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the recording studio. He had already asked the NBC network to let him pre-record his 1944–45 series on transcription discs, but
3630-584: The Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were primarily used to locate landing sites for the crewed Apollo missions . Once those missions were over, the data, on about 1,500 tapes, was largely forgotten since it had served its purpose. The original tapes were carefully archived for 20 years by the government in Maryland. When the tapes were released back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California , in 1986,
3751-760: The United States in 1966 and 1967. Intended to help select Apollo landing sites by mapping the Moon's surface, they provided the first photographs from lunar orbit and photographed both the Moon and Earth. All five missions were successful, and 99 percent of the lunar surface was mapped from photographs taken with a resolution of 60 meters (200 ft) or better. The first three missions were dedicated to imaging 20 potential crewed lunar landing sites, selected based on Earth-based observations. These were flown at low-inclination orbits. The fourth and fifth missions were devoted to broader scientific objectives and were flown in high-altitude polar orbits. Lunar Orbiter 4 photographed
Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project - Misplaced Pages Continue
3872-415: The 15-inch-per-second (38 cm/s) physical motion. They wrote the video vertically across the width of a tape that was 2 inches (51 mm) wide and ran at 15 inches (38 cm) per second. This allowed hour-long television programs to be recorded on one reel of tape. In 1956, one reel of tape cost $ 300; and Ampex advertised the cost of the recorder as $ 45,000. A 7.5-inch-per-second (19 cm/s) version
3993-767: The 1960s when the Apollo landing sites were being selected. Frames for sites such as the Apollo 12 landing site, the Marius Hills, and the Sulpicius Gallus rille have been released. In 2007, the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) began a process to convert the Lunar Orbiter Images directly from the original Ampex FR-900 analog video recordings of the spacecraft data to digital image format,
4114-609: The 1990s, and the company turned to digital storage products. Ampex moved into digital storage for DoD Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) with the introduction of the first, true all digital flight test recorder. Ampex supports numerous major DoD programs with the US Air Force , US Army , US Marines , US Navy and other government entities ( NASA , DHS and national labs). Ampex also works with all major DoD primes and integrators including Boeing , General Atomics , Lockheed , Northrop , Raytheon and many others. Currently, Ampex
4235-519: The Canopus star sensor, and the inertial navigation system. Communications were via a 10 W transmitter and the directional one-meter diameter high-gain antenna for transmission of photographs, and a 0.5 W transmitter and omnidirectional low-gain antenna for other communications. Both transmitters operated in the S band at about 2295 MHz. Thermal control was maintained by a multilayer aluminized Mylar and Dacron thermal blanket which enshrouded
4356-617: The Earth from the Moon , taken in August 1966. On February 20, 2014, the project announced it had completed the primary tape capture portion of the project. One medium resolution image, most of one high resolution image and parts of three others are missing, apparently due to lapses at the time they were being recorded. The rest of the Lunar Orbiter images have been successfully recovered and have been published in NASA's Planetary Data System . The images taken by
4477-560: The FAA, USAF, and NASA. (The FR-900's transport was adapted from the two-inch Quadruplex videotape format, only in the FR-900's case, the drive was designed to record a wideband analog signal of any type for instrumentation or other purposes, rather than specifically a video signal as in the two-inch Quad's case.) Over time, Evans' team also collected documentation and spare parts for the tape drives from various government surplus sources. The project
4598-724: The FM modulator itself. Dolby left Ampex to seek a PhD in physics in England, which is where Dolby Labs was later founded, before moving back to San Francisco. Dolby's brother Dale was also an engineer at Ampex. In 1961, Ampex introduced the first 1-inch helical scan video recorders, the Ampex 2-inch helical VTRs , which recorded video using helical scan recording technology on tape. Ampex 2 inch helical VTRs were manufactured from 1963 to 1970. Model VR-1500 for home. The VR-660 for Broadcast television systems , industrial companies, educational institutions, and
4719-434: The FR-900 series. By coincidence, Zin's brother worked at NASA Ames Research Center and it is via this coincidence that Wingo and Cowing initially got in touch with Zin. With the assistance of Ken Davidian at NASA Headquarters, funding was found in 2008 for a pilot project to show that the drives could be repaired, and that images could be recovered from the original tapes. The first task was to methodically disassemble and clean
4840-807: The HS-100 video disc recorder. The system was developed by Ampex at the request of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) for a variety of sports broadcast uses. It was first demonstrated on the air on March 18, 1967, when ABC's Wide World of Sports televised the "World Series of Skiing" from Vail , Colorado . The video was recorded on analog magnetic disc. The disc weighed 5 pounds (2.3 kg) and rotated at 60 rps, 3600 rpm (50 rps in PAL ). One NTSC unit could record 30 seconds of video, PAL units 36 seconds. The video could then be played back in slow motion, stop action to freeze frame. A more deluxe version,
4961-667: The HS-200, was introduced in April 1968, and provided a large control console with variable speed playback. This made it ideal for instant replay for sports events and precise timing control in post-production service. CBS-TV was the first to use the technique during live sportscasts, though it was quickly adopted by all American TV networks. The HS-200, which was an HS-100 connected to a control console, had greater precise frame and timing control capability, lending itself to post-production applications like special effects and titles. The HS-200 had
Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project - Misplaced Pages Continue
5082-779: The HTML one, scroll down to see the table of contents link. Ampex Ampex Data Systems Corporation is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is an acronym , created by its founder, which stands for A lexander M . P oniatoff Ex cellence. Ampex operates as Ampex Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Delta Information Systems, and consists of two business units. The Silicon Valley unit, known internally as Ampex Data Systems (ADS), manufactures digital data storage systems capable of functioning in harsh environments. The Colorado Springs, Colorado , unit, referred to as Ampex Intelligent Systems (AIS), serves as
5203-594: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory released the tapes to the custody of Ames Research Center. Evans also transferred the ownership of the FR-900 drives to Wingo and Cowing. Wingo and Cowing rented two transfer trucks, loaded up the tape drives and documentation into one truck, and loaded the pallets of analog data tapes into the other truck. Cowing and Wingo then drove the trucks up to Mountain View, California , from Burbank . The drives and tapes then sat in storage for about
5324-544: The LOIRP team. Shortly after moving into McMoon's, a group of students from the NASA Astrobiology Academy was recruited to remove all the tapes from the boxes, and put the tapes in order. Each tape takes about an hour to run on the tape drive, and holds one high-resolution image and one medium-resolution image. When archived in the early 1970s, each reel of tape was labeled, wrapped in a clear plastic bag, and enclosed in
5445-519: The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). Both Cowing and Wingo provided the funds required to get the project started. They spent about a year looking for more funding, facilities, documentation, and expertise. Pete Worden , director of NASA's Ames Research Center , agreed to store the tape drives and tapes in unused warehouse space until funding and facilities could be found to begin the restoration project. In April 2007,
5566-476: The Lunar Orbiter tape recovery effort. They made contact with Jen Heldmann of the NASA Ames Research Center . In early 2007, Horzempa commented on the Lunar Orbiter tape recovery effort on a Web forum, NASASpaceflight.com . As a result, Dennis Wingo contacted Philip Horzempa through that forum. Horzempa put Wingo in contact with Nelson and Evans, and they invited Wingo to join the team. In addition to
5687-585: The Moon from orbit prior to the LRO's photography. Digitized Lunar Orbiter images would be invaluable to scientists studying changes in the Moon's surface. In February 2007, Wingo visited the four Ampex FR-900 tape drives for the first time in Evans's garage. Each drive was about 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, 3 feet (0.9 m) wide, as deep as a refrigerator, and weighed about 600 pounds (270 kg). These were all coated with thick layers of dust and cobwebs. They were stored with
5808-423: The Moon on June 23, 2009, and, after testing, it began its photographic mission that September. One of LRO's primary goals is to determine the risk to people working on the surface of the Moon. The LRO can create images of the surface that are comparable to the highest resolution images taken of the Moon from orbit during the Apollo era. The original Lunar Orbiter images were the highest resolution images ever taken of
5929-531: The Moon was about two orders of magnitude greater than in interplanetary space, but slightly less than in the near-Earth environment. The radiation experiments confirmed that the design of Apollo hardware would protect the astronauts from average and greater than average short term exposure to solar particle events. The use of Lunar Orbiters for tracking to evaluate the Manned Space Flight Network tracking stations and Apollo Orbit Determination Program
6050-731: The Moon. In part because of high interest in the data and in part because that atlas is out of print, the task was undertaken at the Lunar and Planetary Institute to scan the large-format prints of Lunar Orbiter data. These were made available online as the Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon . In 2000, the Astrogeology Research Program of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona
6171-650: The NASA Planetary Data System (PDS), a digital repository for NASA mission and ground support data. Peer review of the LOIRP PDS submission began in May 2017. The LOIRP Online Data Volumes were published for public access by NASA at the PDS Cartography and Imaging Sciences Node on January 31, 2018. Lunar Orbiter The Lunar Orbiter program was a series of five uncrewed lunar orbiter missions launched by
SECTION 50
#17330862882546292-925: The USA: the headquarters in Hayward, CA (about a dozen miles from the Redwood City location in Silicon Valley), a program office in Colorado Springs, CO and an engineering center in Las Cruces, NM, as well as from the main Delta HQ in Horsham, PA. Ampex continues to produce rugged data storage products used by government, military and commercial customers world-wide. Since joining Delta, Ampex has grown in revenue and headcount, employing significantly more people in 2023 than were employed under
6413-465: The actual VTRs themselves to incorporate SMPTE timecode providing advanced timeline control. The RA-4000 and EDM-1 were fully functional early products, but soon evolved to the extremely powerful ACE family to compete with CMX and other edit controller brands. Starting in the early 1950s, RCA, Bing Crosby and others tried to record analog video on very fast-moving magnetic tape . As early as 1952, Ampex developed prototype video tape recorders that used
6534-424: The analog recording formats for both music and movies that remained in use into the 1990s. Starting in the 1950s, the company began developing video tape recorders , and later introduced the helical scan concept that made home video players possible. They also introduced multi-track recording, slow-motion and instant playback television, and a host of other advances. Ampex's tape business was rendered obsolete during
6655-422: The base and either sticking to the backing of the tape layer wound on top of it (resulting in dropout), or being scraped off and deposited on the tape heads while lifting the head off the tape, degrading the treble. The problem has been reported on a number of makes of tape (usually back-coated tapes), including Ampex tapes. Ampex filed U.S. patent 5,236,790 for a baking process ("A typical temperature used
6776-404: The base of the spacecraft were a high gain antenna on a 1.32 m (4 ft 4 in) boom and a low-gain antenna on a 2.08 m (6 ft 10 in) boom. Above the equipment deck, the middle deck held the velocity control engine, propellant, oxidizer, and pressurization tanks, Sun sensors, and micrometeoroid detectors. The third deck consisted of a heat shield to protect the spacecraft from
6897-456: The basis of much of lunar scientific research. Because they were obtained at low to moderate Sun angles, the Lunar Orbiter photographic mosaics are particularly useful for studying the morphology of lunar topographic features. Several atlases and books featuring Lunar Orbiter photographs have been published. Perhaps the most definitive was that of Bowker and Hughes (1971); it contained 675 photographic plates with approximately global coverage of
7018-403: The brief periods of occultation when no solar power was available. Propulsion for major maneuvers was provided by the gimballed velocity control engine, a hypergolic 440 newtons (100 lbf) thrust Marquardt Corp. rocket motor. Three axis stabilization and attitude control were provided by four 4 newtons (1 lbf) nitrogen gas jets. Navigational knowledge was provided by five Sun sensors ,
7139-411: The broadcast industry for a quarter of a century. The format was licensed to RCA for use in their "television tape recorders." Ampex's invention revolutionized the television production industry by eliminating the kinescope process of time-shifting television programs, which required the use of motion picture film. For archival purposes, the kinescope method continued to be used for some years; film
7260-535: The company in San Carlos , California , in 1944 as the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company. The company name came from his initials plus "ex" to avoid using the name AMP already in use (by Aircraft and Marine Products). During World War II , Ampex was a subcontractor to Dalmo-Victor, manufacturing high quality electric motors and generators for radars that used alnico 5 magnets from General Electric . Ampex
7381-539: The complete success of the Lunar Orbiters. The Lunar Orbiter program consisted of five spacecraft which returned photography of 99 percent of the surface of the Moon (near and far side ) with resolution down to 1 meter (3 ft 3 in). Altogether the Orbiters returned 2180 high resolution and 882 medium resolution frames. The micrometeoroid experiments recorded 22 impacts showing the average micrometeoroid flux near
SECTION 60
#17330862882547502-470: The conventional erase/record/playback heads. This allowed Paul to play along with a previously recorded track, both of which were mixed together on to a new track. This was a destructive process because the original recording was recorded over. Ampex built a handful of multitrack machines during the late 1950s that could record as many as eight tracks on 1-inch (25 mm) tape. The project was overseen by Ross Snyder, Ampex manager of special products. To make
7623-536: The crater Copernicus, is from the Lunar Orbiter 2 spacecraft taken on November 24, 1966. NASA Scientist Martin Swetnick was quoted in a Time magazine article from 1966, calling this image "one of the great pictures of the century". By April, the team had digitized 30 images. A couple of months later an article in Computerworld revealed that the project had a new grant of $ 600,000, and had hopes to completely digitize all
7744-460: The decision of whether to scrap the tapes became the responsibility of JPL archivist Nancy Evans. She decided that the tapes should be preserved. She recalled, "I could not morally get rid of this stuff". Within a few years, Nancy Evans and a few colleagues were able to start a small project with funding from NASA. They managed to find four rare Ampex FR-900 tape drives – highly specialized drives that had only been used by government agencies such as
7865-451: The demodulation was discovered, and the team began building a board by hand. Custom belts were being manufactured to replace the old ones. Software was being written to process the digital images. The biggest expense was the heads, which cost around $ 8,000 each to be refurbished. On March 21, 2009, the team announced that they had rescued an un-demodulated image from one of the tapes, using the newly perfected demodulation system. The image, of
7986-455: The development of the Quadruplex video recorder for Ampex was Ray Dolby, who worked under Charlie Ginsburg and went on to form Dolby Laboratories , a pioneer in audio noise reduction systems. Dolby's contribution to the videotape system was limited to the mathematics behind the reactance tube FM modulator, as videotape then used FM modulation for the video portion. Another contributor designed
8107-455: The drive. The head is the mechanism that touches the tape and reads and writes data, so it is absolutely critical; in the case of the Ampex FR-900 tape drives, the heads were not manufactured after 1974, cannot be replaced, and can only be refurbished at great expense by a single small company. After another month of repairing and replacing parts, testing and tuning mechanisms, the project got
8228-525: The early 1950s, Ampex moved to Redwood City, California. Ampex acquired Orradio Industries in 1959, which became the Ampex Magnetic Tape Division, headquartered in Opelika, Alabama . This made Ampex a manufacturer of both recorders and tape. By the end of that decade Ampex products were much in demand by top recording studios worldwide. In 1952, movie producer Mike Todd asked Ampex to develop
8349-408: The entire nearside and nine percent of the far side, and Lunar Orbiter 5 completed the far side coverage and acquired medium (20 m or 66 ft) and high (2 m or 6 ft 7 in) resolution images of 36 preselected areas. All of the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were launched by Atlas-Agena -D launch vehicles. The Lunar Orbiters had an imaging system which consisted of a dual-lens camera ,
8470-405: The firing of the velocity control engine. The nozzle of the engine protruded through the center of the shield. Mounted on the perimeter of the top deck were four attitude control thrusters. Power of 375 W was provided by the four solar arrays containing 10,856 n/p solar cells which would directly run the spacecraft and also charge the 12 A·h nickel-cadmium battery . The batteries were used during
8591-399: The first solid result that the tapes were good. Each tape starts with a short standard-format audio clip of the operator, and the tape drives were able to read the audio signal. ( Hear a sample of the audio. ) This does not use the video heads that are needed to read the Lunar Orbiter data off the tape, but this demonstrated that the tapes had not deteriorated and that many of the sub-systems of
8712-429: The first standardized open-reel videotape formats in the 1 inch (25 mm) width; most others of that size at that time were proprietary. 1 inch type C videotape (designated Type C by SMPTE) was a professional open-reel videotape format co-developed and introduced by Ampex and Sony in 1976. It became the replacement in the professional video and television broadcast industries for the then-incumbent Quadruplex. D2
8833-534: The first-ever U.S. delayed radio broadcast of Bing Crosby's Philco Radio Time . Ampex tape recorders revolutionized the radio and recording industries because of their superior audio quality and ease of operation over audio disk cutting lathes . The firm's earliest production of multichannel machines wasn't aimed at music recording; it noted in 1953–54 that "Ampex began the commercial production of multitrack tape recorders about four years ago for those interested in telemetered information from guided missiles and
8954-504: The images by February 2010. Most of the new funding came from NASA, but about 10% came from other donors. This new funding allowed the team to restore a second tape drive to full operation by November 2009, which made the process of restoring the images that much faster. The Ampex FR-900 heads were refurbished by Videomagnetics of Colorado Springs, Colorado, the only company in the world that still refurbished Ampex and RCA Quadruplex video heads. By April 2017, all images had been delivered to
9075-496: The introduction of SMPTE time code allowed studios to run multiple machines in perfect synchronization, making the number of available tracks virtually unlimited. By the 1970s, Ampex faced tough competition from the Swiss company Studer and Japanese manufacturers such as Otari and Sony (who also purchased the MCI brand in 1982). In 1979, Ampex introduced their most advanced 24-track recorder,
9196-571: The legality of speech in an electronic public forum. After becoming part of Delta Information Systems in 2014, two former subsidiaries of Ampex Corporation continued business as part of the Ampex legacy. Ampex Data Systems Corporation (ADSC) headquartered in Silicon Valley, and its subsidiary, Ampex Japan Ltd. are the only two Ampex businesses that still trade as more than "in name only" entities. Ampex Data Systems operates out of main three locations in
9317-504: The like. These equipments provided any number of simultaneous channels up to 14. It was a simple step, therefore, to make stereophonic tape recorders with two or more channels." During the early 1950s, Ampex began marketing one- and two-track machines using 1 ⁄ 4 -inch (6.4 mm) tape. In May 1953 the firm announced production of two- and three-track machines on 1/4 inch tape. The line soon expanded into three- and four-track models using 1 ⁄ 2 -inch (13 mm) tape. In
9438-535: The main bus, special paint, insulation, and small heaters. Originally, the Air Force had offered NASA several spare cameras from the KH-7 GAMBIT program, but then authorities became concerned over security surrounding the classified cameras, including the possibility of images of the Moon giving away their resolution. Some proposals were made that NASA not publish the orbital parameters of the Lunar Orbiter probes so that
9559-459: The many American technological advances. In 1967, Ampex introduced the Ampex VR-3000 portable broadcast video recorder, which revolutionized the recording of broadcast quality television in the field without the need for long cables and large support vehicles. Broadcast quality images could now be shot anywhere, including from airplanes, helicopters and boats. The Quadruplex format dominated
9680-806: The model ATR-124. The ATR-124 was ruggedly constructed and had audio specifications that nearly rivaled the first digital recording machines. However, sales of the ATR-124 were slow due to the machine's high price tag. Ampex sold only about 50 or 60 ATR-124 machines and withdrew from the professional audio tape recorder market entirely in 1983. By the 1990s Ampex focused more on video recorders, instrumentation recorders, and data recorders. In 1991, Ampex sold their professional audio recorder line to Sprague Magnetics. The Ampex Recording Media Corporation spun off in 1995 as Quantegy Inc. ; that company has ceased producing recording tape. While AMPEX are well recognized for their contribution to magnetic tape recording, they also had
9801-475: The mosaics were created and several copies were distributed across the U.S. to NASA image and data libraries known as Regional Planetary Information Facilities . The resulting outstanding views were of generally very high spatial resolution and covered a substantial portion of the lunar surface, but they suffered from a "venetian blind" striping, missing or duplicated data, and frequent saturation effects that hampered their use. For many years these images have been
9922-560: The multitrack recorder work, Snyder invented the Sel-Sync process, which used some tracks on the head for playback and other tracks on the head for recording. This made the newly recorded material be in sync with the existing recorded tracks. The first of these machines cost $ 10,000 and was installed in Les Paul 's home recording studio by David Sarser . In 1967, Ampex responded to demand by stepping up production of their 8-track machines with
10043-412: The network refused; so Crosby had withdrawn from live radio for a year and returned (this time to the recently created ABC ) for the 1946–47 season, only reluctantly. In June 1947, Mullin, who was pitching the technology to the major Hollywood movie studios, got the chance to demonstrate his modified tape recorders to Crosby. When Crosby heard a demonstration of Mullin's tape recorders, he immediately saw
10164-450: The new Ampex Quadruplex recording system was CBS 's Douglas Edwards and the News on November 30, 1956. The "Quad" head assembly rotates at 14,400 rpm ( NTSC ). The four head pieces (quad) are switched successively so that recorded stripes cross the video portion (most of the tape middle, audio is on one edge, control track is on the other) so that head to tape write speed is well in excess of
10285-561: The new recorders so that Ampex (then a small six-man concern) could develop a commercial production model from the prototypes. Crosby Enterprises was Ampex's West Coast representative until 1957. The company's first tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200A, was first shipped in April 1948. The first two units, serial numbers 1 and 2, were used to record Bing Crosby's show. The American Broadcasting Company used these recorders along with 3M Scotch 111 gamma ferric oxide coated acetate tape for
10406-407: The next year as funding for the project was sought. Since the team required a facility with proper heating and cooling, and a sink, available vacant buildings outside the gate of Ames Research Center were whittled down to two: a barber shop, and a McDonald's restaurant that had closed weeks before. The barber shop was relatively small, so working there would have required that the tapes be stored at
10527-467: The operator has a distinctly Spanish accent. On tapes marked with a "W", the operator has a distinctly Australian accent. On tapes marked with a "G" the operator speaks with an American accent. Sometimes audio track captures an operator at one tracking station talking to an operator at another tracking station. Each tape's opening audio includes the date that the tape was recorded in both local and Universal Time. There are many other confusing problems with
10648-518: The original film into a series of strips. The data were written to magnetic tape and also to film. The film data were used to create hand-made mosaics of Lunar Orbiter frames. Each LO exposure resulted in two photographs: medium-resolution frames recorded by the 80-mm focal-length lens and high-resolution frames recorded by the 610-mm focal length lens. Due to their large size, HR frames were divided into three sections, or sub-frames. Large-format prints (16 by 20 inches (410 mm × 510 mm)) from
10769-479: The potential of the new technology and commissioned Mullin to prepare a test recording of his radio show. Ampex was finishing its prototype of the Model 200 tape recorder, and Mullin used the first two models as soon as they were built. After a successful test broadcast, ABC agreed to allow Crosby to pre-record his shows on tape. Crosby immediately appointed Mullin as his chief engineer and placed an order for $ 50,000 worth of
10890-538: The production model MM 1000. Like earlier 8-track machines of this era, it used 1-inch tape. In 1966, Ampex built their first 16-track recorder, the model AG-1000, at the request of Mirasound Studios in New York City. In 1967, Ampex introduced a 16-track version of the MM 1000 which was the world's first 16-track professional tape recorder put into mass-production. Both used a 2-inch (51 mm) tape transport design adapted from
11011-462: The project started in earnest in July 2008, results came quickly. In only a couple of weeks, the first tape drive had been powered up, although it was clear that many parts still needed to be replaced. Another week of cleaning and testing revealed that among the four drives and batches of spare parts there were enough good power supplies to run one of the tape drives, and there was at least one working head for
11132-404: The project. He began sending out an email newsletter, one that was later converted to a blog, MoonViews.com, and posting photos to the project's Facebook page. Student interns from the nearby San Jose State University were recruited, and the team requested help from retired and current employees of Ampex and from blog writers with audiences that might be able to help. Every day there seemed to be
11253-414: The quadruplex recording system per se is no longer in use, the principle evolved into the helical scanning technique used in virtually all video tape machines, such as those using the consumer formats of VHS , Sony Betamax and Video 2000 . Sony Betacam was successful as a professional format but operated with a different recording system and faster tape speed than Betamax. One of the key engineers in
11374-410: The resolution of the images could not be calculated through their altitude. In the end, NASA's existing camera systems, while lower resolution, proved to be adequate for the needs of the mission. Kodak created and constructed built eight photographic subsystems for the Lunar Orbiter program, five of which were used in space missions of 1966 and 1967. The camera used two lenses to simultaneously expose
11495-547: The stripes that had been noticeable in the original photographic frames. Because of its emphasis on construction of a global mosaic, this project only scanned about 15% of the available Lunar Orbiter photographic frames. Data from Lunar Orbiter missions III , IV and V were included in the global mosaic. In addition, the USGS digitization project created frames from very high resolution Lunar Orbiter images for several 'sites of scientific interest.' These sites had been identified in
11616-430: The strips together to create a whole image. Before even beginning the project, the team evaluated the risks and determined that there were two: one was that the tapes had deteriorated to the point where they could not be read; the second was that the tape drives would not be able to read the tapes. The milestones of the project were developed to test these risks as soon as possible with the least amount of money spent. Once
11737-399: The tape drive were in good working order. The documentation for the tape drives was substantially incomplete, which kept the team from understanding the right way to repair, maintain, and use the tape drives. The search for documentation has been extensive and usually disappointing, as it often turns out that retired or elderly engineers have just recently cleaned out their garages. Posting to
11858-403: The tape drives mentioned above, Nelson had been able to obtain several tape heads. The tape drives were absolutely essential to any effort to read the original Lunar Orbiter data tapes. Dennis Wingo is president of the aerospace engineering company SkyCorp and a long-time worker in space and computing technologies. He knew he could muster the technical skills to tackle the management of renovating
11979-559: The tape drives sat in Evans's garage. In 2004, Philip Horzempa was doing research on the Lunar Orbiter program at the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C. In its archives, he happened to come across a memo from 1996 containing a proposal by Mark Nelson to digitize the Lunar Orbiter images, as described above. After about a year of searching, Horzempa made contact with Mark Nelson. The two of them decided to find funding and to restart
12100-504: The tape drives, he could find contacts at NASA, and most importantly, he knew that the Moon was becoming a hot property again. Wingo said, "I knew the value of the tape drives and the tapes". Another group thought the same, writing, "future missions to the Moon have re-energized the lunar community and renewed interest in the Lunar Orbiter data". A newer spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), entered orbit around
12221-417: The tape drives. Meanwhile, Zin began testing the systems of the tape drives and making lists of devices to replace and refurbish. Parts for the drives were bought on eBay, online electronic parts stores, and other places. Wingo and Cowing plunged into the management of the project: ordering parts, managing funds, searching surplus yards for equipment, researching refurbishing companies, and recruiting allies to
12342-561: The tape was recorded in Madrid, Spain ; "W" indicates that the tape was recorded in Woomera, Australia ; and "G" indicates that the tape was recorded in Goldstone, California . This guess was confirmed when the team listened to the audio track at the beginning of a few of the tapes, wherein the operator of the ground station recites information about the tape and the recording. On tapes marked with an "M",
12463-402: The tape-drive heads apply a very specific magnetic field to the tape; the tape then induces a change in electric current, which is captured. The data from the Lunar Orbiter tapes is then run through a demodulator, and through an analog-to-digital converter so that it can be fed into a computer for digital processing. Each image is divided up into strips on the tape, so the computer is used to bring
12584-447: The tapes. Each tape is supposed to hold a complete pair of images, but some contain just a few minutes of audio signal, and some contain the same tiny portion of an image, over and over. In the early stages of the project, the team wanted to rescue images that have the most value and impact, but they found that it was very time intensive to find images in this disordered array of tapes. In a completed and working magnetic tape drive system,
12705-404: The team to understand the correct procedures for repairing the tape drives and aligning the mechanics. At this point in the restoration, the demodulation of the tapes had become the biggest issue. The team was not sure if the demodulation board that came with the system was the correct one, if they needed a different one, or if they needed this one and another one. At the same time, they discovered
12826-409: The term "technoarchaeology" to describe the process of researching which tape contained what image. Posts to the blog continued, but with little substance until suddenly NASA announced a press conference. On November 13, 2008 NASA held a press conference and announced that they were releasing the first image that had been restored: a striking image, taken on August 23, 1966, of the Earth as viewed, for
12947-477: The very first time, from the Moon. This was a major milestone that showed that the tapes and the tape drives were both good. Preliminary analysis showed that the image had "four times the dynamic range of the ... [original] film image and up to twice the ultimate resolution". The NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) had sponsored the team so far with a small grant of $ 100,000. With these results, more funds were released—another $ 150,000 to complete
13068-558: The video recording division. The 16-track MM-1000 quickly became legendary for its tremendous flexibility, reliability and outstanding sound quality. This brought about the "golden age" of large format analog multitrack recorders which would last into the mid-1990s. MCI built the first 24-track recorder (using 2-inch tape) in 1968 which was installed at TTG Studios in Los Angeles. Later machines built by Ampex starting in 1969 would have as many as 24 tracks on 2 inch tape. In addition to this,
13189-420: The whole Earth was taken by Lunar Orbiter 5 on 8 August 1967. A second photo of the whole Earth was taken by Lunar Orbiter 5 on 10 November 1967. The Boeing-Eastman Kodak proposal was announced by NASA on 20 December 1963. The main bus of the Lunar Orbiter had the general shape of a truncated cone, 1.65 m (5 ft 5 in) tall and 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in) in diameter at the base. The spacecraft
13310-406: Was available to perform the foreground layering and priority switching – to reduce the burden on the vision mixer with multi-channel effects. AVC – The AVC range of vision mixers ranged from small, single buss devices up to the high-end Century Series, with multiple Mix/Effect busses, infinite re-entry and powerful keying and control software. The product line evolved quickly from manual editing on
13431-461: Was composed of three decks supported by trusses and an arch. The equipment deck at the base of the craft held the battery, transponder , flight programmer, inertial reference unit (IRU), Canopus star tracker , command decoder, multiplex encoder, traveling-wave tube amplifier (TWTA), and the photographic system. Four solar panels were mounted to extend out from this deck with a total span across of 3.72 m (12.2 ft). Also extending out from
13552-681: Was funded by NASA (as part of the Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project Archived 2017-11-23 at the Wayback Machine ) to scan at 25 micrometer resolution archival LO positive film strips that were produced from the original data. The goal was to produce a global mosaic of the Moon using the best available Lunar Orbiter frames (largely the same coverage as that of Bowker and Hughes, 1971). The frames were constructed from scanned film strips; they were digitally constructed, geometrically controlled, and map-projected without
13673-541: Was initially set up in an abandoned loft-space above the Dalmo-Victor plant; eventually they would have offices at 1313 Laurel Street, San Carlos, California (at the intersection of Howard Avenue and Laurel Street). Near the end of the war, while serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Major Jack Mullin was assigned to investigate German radio and electronics experiments. He discovered the Magnetophons with AC biasing on
13794-405: Was introduced in 1996. The final generation of these products were quad density, introduced in 2000, resulting in a large cartridge holding 660GB of data. Some master tapes and other recordings predominantly from the 1970s and 1980s have degraded due to the so-called sticky-shed syndrome . When sticky-shed syndrome occurs, the binding agent deteriorates, resulting in the magnetic coating coming off
13915-399: Was moved during exposure to compensate for the spacecraft velocity , which was estimated by an electro-optical sensor. The film was then processed, scanned, and the images transmitted back to Earth. During the Lunar Orbiter missions, the first pictures of Earth as a whole were taken, beginning with Earth-rise over the lunar surface by Lunar Orbiter 1 in August, 1966. The first full picture of
14036-422: Was picked up by Atlantic Records . In 2005, iNEXTV, a wholly owned subsidiary of respondent Ampex Corporation, brought a defamation lawsuit against a poster on an Internet message board who posted messages critical of them (Ampex Corp. v. Cargle (2005), Cal.App.4th). The poster, a former employee, responded with an anti- SLAPP suit and eventually recovered his attorney fees. The case was unique in that it involved
14157-409: Was released later, and this required a new, narrower headwheel. This vertical writing facilitated mechanical editing, once the control track was developed to display the pulse that indicates where a frame ends and the next one begins. Later, Ampex developed electronic editing. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Ampex its first Emmy in 1957 for this development. Ampex received
14278-399: Was still preferred by archivists. The Ampex broadcast video tape recorder facilitated time-zone broadcast delay so that networks could air programming at the same hour in various time zones. Ampex had trademarked the name " video tape ", so competitor RCA called the medium "TV tape" or "television tape". The terms eventually became genericized , and "videotape" is commonly used today. While
14399-449: Was successful at getting the raw analog data from the tapes, but in order to generate the images, they discovered that they needed the specialized demodulation hardware that had been used by the Lunar Orbiter program but no longer existed. The members of the team attempted to get funding from NASA and private sources to build the hardware, but they were unsuccessful. Eventually, both Nancy Evans and Mark Nelson went on to other projects while
14520-404: Was successful, with three of the Lunar Orbiters (2, 3, and 5) being tracked simultaneously from August through October 1967. The Lunar Orbiters were all eventually commanded to crash on the Moon before their attitude control fuel ran out so they would not present navigational or communications hazards to later Apollo flights. The Lunar Orbiter program was managed by NASA Langley Research Center at
14641-402: Was the message that the images are a vital piece of history, but more than this, that they contain scientific data of a time, place, and quality that has not been repeated. These are images that can assist in the current research about the Moon and the climate of the Earth. There may even be other lost data from the same era recorded using the same tape drives that could benefit from the efforts of
#253746