People of a certain age remember when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and a large percentage of us were watching the live broadcast of man’s first step to the lunar surface. The picture was fuzzy and grainy, and the audio was none too good either. But you could see and hear something and it was a thrilling moment shared by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Actually, the picture was a lot better than we ever knew
According to an article in the Washington Post, the slow-scan TV system had much better quality than we ever saw. According to WaPo, the signal:
. . . was transmitted from the moon to ground sites in Australia and the Mojave Desert in California, where technicians reformatted the video for broadcast and transmitted long-distance over analog lines to Houston. A lot of video quality was lost during that process, turning clear, bright images into gray blobs and oddly moving shapes . . . .
The high-quality slow-scan TV pictures were preserved on tape, while commercial TV cameras captured the output of the tracking station SSTV monitors – a major loss of signal quality right there – and transmitted that feed to Houston and then on to us.
Backup hell
A few years ago it occurred to some of the folks who were at the tracking stations that it would be cool to see that original high-quality SSTV picture. NASA just had one machine that could read the tapes, so time was – and data formats – were marching on.
Houston, we have a problem
After several years of searching, the couldn’t find the tapes. The original record of this historic event is likely lost forever. Conspiracy theorists who insist the lunar landing was faked may be elated, but I’m bummed.
The StorageMojo take
The preservation of electronically stored information is no simple task, as the billions of dollars spent each year on RAID, backup software and archiving software and services attest. NASA could have benefitted from LOCKSS, had it existed back in the summer of ’69. LOCKSS stands for Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. If there is a better strategy I haven’t heard of it.
Comments welcome, of course. Moderation turned on because moderation is a virtue, except in the defense of liberty.
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Rumor says the tapes were intentionally hidden from public b/c they videotaped something interesting on the moon.
Another system that is being used by many institutions is DSpace:
http://www.dspace.org/
http://www.google.com/search?q=dspace
not sure if LOCKS is the answer. I know for sure the hell of versioncontrol is imminent with this solution.
Updating several copies of a document is a lot of troublesome work. Only when your sure a document is in it’s final stages LOCKS coulb be a option. But things like security, privacy and so on… no LOCKS for me..
I can hardly believe that those tapes are lost.
What, they didn’t make any copies while they were studying the tapes after the mission – they worked with the originals? Right…
Lost for the public – probably.
These tapes were most likely marked confidential/top secret with limited access to them. To move them someone would have to sign a few forms here and there.
If there is no ‘traces’, ‘somebody’ took care of that – if you know what I mean.
What is the reason is other story – these tapes are priceless.
Dude, your info is out of date. Check out http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/818 and also google for ‘lost nasa tapes found’ for more.
Oops! Looks like they found data tapes, not the still-missing video that you were referring to.
Cheng,
The latest version of that rumor is in the Transformers movie trailer. woot!
David
Thanks for the tip on DSpace. I quickly scanned the DSpace website and FAQ the possibly faulty impression I got is that DSpace is a repository for preserving documents for a single organization, where LOCKSS is a strategy and software to ensure that documents are preserved against loss through multiple copies. Some overlap, but two different approaches. Another resource is the The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress.
se,
I agree that LOCKSS is really a solution for “completed” documents, not “work-in-process”. The whole versioning discussion is a very big can of worms that I will beg off opening now.
Miro,
The WaPo article suggested that since the moon landing was such a huge PR success, and there was no demand for better footage, that the original tapes were never reviewed, except, perhaps, by personnel at the tracking stations who knew of their existence. That feels about right to me, given that the “moon race” of the 1960s was a political tool and an engineering tour-de-force, not a science experiment.
PJ,
I wish you were correct. The WaPo article is dated January 31, 2007, while the Cosmos Magazine article is from November 2006.
A careful reading of the Cosmos link uncovers a number of qualifications. Yes they did find a number of “lost” NASA tapes – but none of them were the high-quality videos of the man’s first steps on the moon. The Cosmos article states:
Useful stuff, to be sure, but not the moonwalk videos. Same goes for the other links that a Google search finds: useful stuff; not the videos whose degraded image 600 million people watched that July day in 1969.
Wish you were right though!
Robin
While I don’t think the storage back-end currently supports replication by default, there is at least one major project looking into it:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22china+digital+museum%22
There are some other projects working on replication and federation as well, but I’m not following the DSpace project too closely so I can’t really say for sure–I just thought you might be interested. Here’s a general overview:
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/281/11/Federating+DSpace.pdf
From what I can gather the primary objective of DSpace is being able to find and access objects. Though I don’t think there’s anything stopping the architecture from supporting a replication scheme in its storage model.
http://www.google.com/search?q=dspace+srb
The Handle system also doesn’t restrict what is returned when the handle is resolved, so if the object(s) is store in multiple locations (even in multiple formats) it would be possible to return multiple instanaces of “typed data” and the client can do whatever it wants:
http://www.handle.net/overviews/overview.html
Magda – you’re an idiot with the conspiro crap
if it was a hoax, how come we can bounce a laser off the reflecting mirrors?
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/mlrs/
but LOCKSS rules!