A few months ago there was news that the moon landing footage (the original film) was lost and there was a huge race against time to find it before something happened (the last camera that could load the film was destroyed... I really can't recall).
What's the current status? Has it since been located?
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Please no "the moon landing never happened" answers. That's not an answer to my question.
2007-09-07 01:20:42 · 3 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Astronomy & Space
Not that I have heard. A data tape was discovered in Australia but no video imaging.
2007-09-07 01:36:13 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Just to clarify, as I have seen a lot of confusion over this:
The tape that was lost was recorded at the tracking station in Australia that received the TV signal directly from the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission (the Moon was not visible from the US at the time). This station then re-transmitted the TV to NASA Mission Control in Houston. This could not directly be transmitted to TV across the world, however, because the format was not supported by TV stations. It had been specially setup to operate without using excessive bandwidth on the communications channels. The probelm was there was no conversion equipment to make it compatible with TV broadcast. The solution: put it on a large monitor in mission control, point a standard TV camera at that monitor and broadcast the output from that camera. That is what was recorded at NASA, and what is currently stored in the archives: a copy made by pointing a camera at a screen showing a re-transmitted signal.
The lost tape was recorded directly at the Australian tracking station, and therefore contains the footage as received directly from the Moon. It therefore contains a better quality version of what we already have. The footage is not lost in the sense that we can no longer watch Neil Armstrong's first steps, but the best available copy of it is currently mislaid.
As far as I know a tape containing a large quantity of telemetry data was recovered, but no sign of the TV footage. The last available machine that can read the tape format that was used is, as I recall, due to be decommissioned at the end of the month. If the tape isn't found we will still have the footage to watch, it just won't be as good as it could have been had the tape been located.
2007-09-07 09:51:48 · answer #2 · answered by Jason T 7 · 3⤊ 0⤋
I heard some film was found in cold storage they were releasing, but not that it was landing footage, Maybe it's this?
2007-09-07 12:57:51 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋