I ran across an interesting article today on a image recovery project for some of the earliest up-close pictures of the moon. They were originally taken from the Lunar Orbiter crafts which were launched back in the 60′s to map potential landing sites for the Apollo missions.
To make a long story short, the original images were recorded on tapes but the machines to play them back were very hard to find and in most cases didn’t work. A few entrprising individuals decided those images needed to be saved and took great pains to make sure it happened.
The fruits of all that labor are some stunning images of the moon as it was in the 1960. It’s great to be able to record data, but it’s even more important to have the “player”.
