McMoon Project: New Technologies Rebirth Lunar Orbiter 60s Luna Photos

Original photograph of the 60s and its modern incarnation

In the 1960s, NASA launched the Lunar Orbiter program, which aims to find landing sites on the Moon that were used by Apollo expeditions. In particular, data from the Lunar Orbiter program was also used to plan the landing of the Apollo-11 module, with two people who became the first representatives of humanity on the Moon.

Each of the Lunar Orbiter devices was equipped with a special two-lens camera. While one lens received an image of the surface of a large area, the second shot small surface details. The project used 70mm film, which, in theory, allowed to get very high-quality photos.
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However, the film did not hit the Earth - according to plan, the Lunar Orbiter vehicles, upon completing their mission, fell to the Moon. Each device was also equipped with a film development module and data transmission to the Earth. As a result, as one would expect, the quality of photographs obtained on Earth was worse than in the case of direct work with the film. Interference, interference, a huge distance - all this led to a deterioration in the quality of the signal, and, accordingly, the images received on Earth.



On Earth, scientists recorded all incoming information on a magnetic tape; in total, about 1,500 cassettes were recorded. After the project was completed, the cassettes and all project data were abandoned. No, they are not thrown away, but they have been forgotten for many decades.


Another restored frame

And so, in the early 2000s, a group of enthusiasts, astronomers and engineers who decided to transfer information from films to digital form appeared, processing the photos in order to improve their quality. The headquarters of the scientists was abandoned McDonald’s, next to one of the NASA databases.



Therefore, the project was nicknamed McMoon (the official name of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project ). Now a huge amount of old data has been digitized, and all this can be seen here .