NASA to Scan Moon Photos

by Jordan Yerman | November 14, 2008 at 06:39 am

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Do you still have a bunch of tapes sitting around that you can't play? So does NASA, and the space agency is undertaking a project to digitize its old moon photos, which are stored on magnetic tape.

The purpose of the project is to compare the 1960s photos with current ones in order to see how the lunar surface has changed.

The images in question were taken in the 1960s by cameras onboard five separate Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. They were captured on magnetic tapes and then transferred to film for analysis.

Unfortunately, the full resolution of those images was not available because the technology didn't exist to extract it all.

And in the years since, the data has been stored on large tapes, awaiting the eventual decision of what to do about them.