Lunar Orbiter: What Goes Round

The Lunar Orbiter may seem like an odd choice of model for a toy line. The Triang Spacex line had previously concentrated on spacecraft and vehicles which veered more towards science fiction, than science fact, but the advent of the second series included actual models based on real life vehicles such as the Apollo spacecraft, Soyuz, the ATS and the Orbiter. Whether this was a decision based on marketing and an attempt to cash in on some of the most recognizable machines in modern history, or just an economy of choice and simplicity, it may never be known. Either way, tucked in amongst Booster Rockets, Rocket Transporters, Crash Tenders and Salvage Craft, was a neat little model of one of the most underrated space probes of all time.

As NASA was keen to pave the way for a manned landing, given President Kennedy's response to the space race with the soviets, the original three stage plan for lunar exploration using the Ranger, Surveyor and Prospector probes, was curtailed. NASA needed to understand what the lunar surface was like and how feasible it might be to make a secure landing. The original idea to place unmanned roving vehicles to scout out proposed sites was deemed to costly and impractical, so the decision was made to use tried and trusted techniques and take high resolution photographs from low orbit.

 Between 1966 and 67, five unmanned probes were sent to the moon, initially to scout potential landing sites for Apollo with the final two probes mapping the lunar farside from a polar orbit, covering 99% of the moons surface. The probe was designed by Boeing with the imaging system provided by Eastman Kodak. The dual cameras photographed the surface onto film, which was then scanned digitally and transmitted to Earth for retrieval.

Boeing Engineering Mockup

Lunar Orbiter diagram from Kenneth Gatland's 'Robot Explorers'

Whilst the Soviet Luna 3 probe had recorded the first image of the lunar farside, the images were grainy and indistinct, whereas the Lunar Orbiter series managed to capture the moon as it was bathed in sunlight, enabling NASA engineers to prepare a useable map of the far side.

LUNA 3 Farside Photograph

The data was transmitted to Earth and the information was recorded on magnetic tape and film as a back up. Some of the more prominent information was then used to create large format mosaic images, which would be used as the basic of both publicity and reference material. 

However, the bulk of the images were never processed and remained stored on tape. These were archived for the next 20 years, until in 1986 they were released back to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a decision as to whether to curate or discard the old tapes. As the means needed to read the tapes had become long obsolete, recovering the information was impractical. 

Rather than lose the huge amount of scientifically invaluable data, a small team of dedicated technicians made the decision to attempt to recover the images and with some limited funding from NASA, four old AMPEX FR-900 tape drives were procured and set up in the garage of one of the technicians. The 1500 tapes could be read and accessed, but in order to render images from the data, special software was needed, which no longer existed, so the tapes and drives were put back into storage once more until a solution could be found. 

In 2004, they were rediscovered and momentum gathered to restart the project. As a result, the team was moved into an old McDonalds restaurant on the JPL base, nicknamed 'McMoons' and the labour intensive project got under way.

Original quality 1966 compared to modern rendering

Re-interpreting the original data from the tapes resulted in an amazingly detailed and high quality image, compared to the original quality received in 1966. When the project eventually drew to a close in 2014 with the project fully completed, all the materials and drives were given over to NASA national archives. The stunning images and the background to the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) can be seen here:

https://moonviews.com/

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/LOIRP/loirp-gallery-index.html