Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

To: Freedom4US

“No still photographs were destroyed, that’s just silly. I hope you’re not one of those Moon hoaxer nutjobs.”


No. Sorry. It is well documented that NASA cleaned out a huge amount of stills and videos. You’ll just have to go looking for the documentation yourself - I long ago lost or forgot the links to the various places. Much of it took place in the early 80s and 90s, and I’ve been through several computers and many hard drives over the years and some data was lost or destroyed in the transitions.

NASA is very infamous for ‘disappearing’ many things (including lunar rock samples) over the years during the various changes in management. This has nothing to do with hoaxes - its often put down to various things, but usually just plain government bureaucracy at work. Things that should have been kept have turned up in private collections or at auctions. Many of the remaining stills are copes of copies of copies and so on for generations - much of the clarity of the lost/destroyed original is no longer on the images; they are very badly degraded - especially those available as highly compressed .jpegs.

Just recently someone found the original images of Armstrong as he set food on the moon and has been restored somewhat. Remember the formats in use then for video images are nothing like today’s and conversion often does not go well - you actually have to see the original played on the intended tech, not your PC or digital TV.

During recent times, all of the US Navy’s Clementine hi-res images of the moon remain classified. Many of the Mars and other lunar missions images and data are no longer publicly available. Perhaps that material still exists at the various NASA sites and JPL. To access it, you’d have to put in a request (but you need to know the catalogue numbers and so on - which again are not publicly available), or else visit and look through their respective catalogues personally - a task which could take days or weeks.

I think I read somewhere that there exist a project to digitize the remaining material from Apollo, but it will take many years to complete - if it does not run out of money and interest before it is finished.


20 posted on 12/21/2017 5:45:41 AM PST by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 16 | View Replies ]


To: PIF
The television camera system on the Apollo 11 lunar module was a non-standard, low-res, "slow scan TV" device, to conserve weight and bandwidth. The signal from that system had to be upconverted for broadcast TV. The mag tapes of the original slowscan TV signal were accidentally erased and recorded over. Only the (badly) upconverted version survives.

I believe that's what you're remembering. I'm unaware of any other large-scale loss of worthwhile Apollo artifacts.

Clementine was a joint effort by NASA and the DOD, specifically the SDI program. I'm not able to find corroboration that there are large numbers of Clementine images that remain classified, but if there are, it's because the government wants to keep their imaging capabilities a secret.

23 posted on 12/21/2017 6:07:20 AM PST by Campion (Halten Sie sich unbedingt an die Lehre!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies ]

To: PIF
"You'll just have to look it up yourself." Ah, no. That's not how it works. _You_ made the claim therefore it's up to _you_ to prove it. It's not up to me to prove you wrong. Makes sense, right? "It's well documented". Well OK, then it should be very easy for you to produce evidence right? Specifically, that Hasselblad negatives were destroyed. I'm aware that certain telemetry tapes were lost or recorded over. And, some film magazines were inadvertantly left on the lunar surface. Oops! But no way anybody threw out any negatives. They are all at Johnson Space Center in a vault, guaranteed. Also at the time of the Apollo 11 landings, the live video feed was received in Australia, and displayed on a television with a different scan rate than used in the US. The workaround was to simply point another video camera at the television screen running NTSC and broadcast that dim, grainy feed of a feed. That is what Americans watched live on their televisions in July 1969, if the original Kookubara (or wherever it was lol) tapes could be found it would be a huge improvement. There is a huge amount of digitized NASA footage - from the original16 mm films and they are outstanding, the clarity is astonishing. Back then we saw nothing like that, just an amorphous blob on our screen and barely identifiable features like craters or clouds. At the time live television broadcast via satellite was a pretty big deal, to have live TV coverage and briadcast from Space/Moon orbit must have really been something even if a bit crude.
30 posted on 12/21/2017 12:28:56 PM PST by Freedom4US
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson