Scientists have restored photos from the polar weather satellite of the 60s

50 years ago, the modest US meteorological satellite Nimbus-1 entered solar synchronous orbit not far from the Arctic and began to take the first photos that by today's standards look scary: these are black and white grainy pictures. Following the first, six more Nimbus series weather satellites were launched.

The American meteorologist David Gallagher (David Gallaher) at the time was 8 years old, and he did not even suspect that after half a century he would need photos from these satellites. Their value is extremely high because they recorded the state of sea ice in different regions of the Arctic and Antarctic 17 years before scientists began to keep an official chronicle of the state of ice.

However, to get and restore the pictures was very difficult, writes Barent Observer. First, Gallagher made a request to the National Climatic Data Center and asked them to send satellite photographs of Greenland in the 1960s, but they only laughed at it. He was told that no one tried to classify these records. If he wants to see the photos, he will have to scan the films himself.
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As it turned out, all the pictures from that time were stored in 25 boxes filled with 60-meter films. These were not even the originals of the images. Using the technology of their time, scientists recorded photos on magnetic tape, then launched it to watch on TV - and took photos from the screen!



Each film is signed with the coordinates of the satellite at the time of shooting.

To digitize the data, Gallacher sent the tapes to the Montreal-based company JBI, which took $ 10 each coil to digitize (hopefully, it was not a scientist's personal money). As a result, he received about 200,000 photos of several gigabytes. The contents of 25 boxes fit on one flash drive.

This is truly unique data on the state of sea ice, which is now available for public access .

David has plans to free up other data that is hidden from the scientific community and is gathering dust somewhere in archives on old media.

For example, photos from the Viking station of Mars (1976-1982) have recently been decoded.