Apollo 11 TV Tapes Go Missing

[BJ_M]

On July 21st 1969, Honeysuckle Creek observatory brought us the first TV pictures of men on the moon. 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. Unfortunately John Sarkissian of Parkes Observatory Australia reports that 698 of the 700 boxes of original tapes have gone missing [warning: large PDF] from the U.S. National Archives. Even more worryingly, the last place on earth which can actually read these tapes is scheduled to close in October this year. The PDF contains interesting comparisons which show that if all you've seen are the TV pictures from the landing, you really haven't seen the first moon walk in its full glory."

http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/TV_from_Moon.html


http://www.honeysucklecreek.net.nyud.net:8080/Apollo_11/tapes/Search_for_SSTV_Tapes.pdf




The high resolution slow-scan TV monitor is this one at the top of the slow-scan TV processing rack to the left of Ed von Renouard at the TV operational console at Honeysuckle.

This monitor could display the ‘standard’ slow scan picture of 10 frames per second at 320 lines per frame or a high resolution mode of 0.625 frames per second at 1280 lines per frame.

In practice, only the lower resolution video of 320 lines was transmitted back to Earth.

Directly above Ed’s head (and clearly visible in the large version of the photo) is the toggle switch to invert to television for the beginning of the broadcast when the camera was mounted upside-down in the MESA on the side of the descent stage of the Lunar Module.

[Epicurus8a]

Gee, that looks like the place where I work today.

I'm sure the people who say the Apollo program was faked wil have a field day with this.