bluestar
17-07-2009, 08:01 AM
Channel 9 News Australia-
NASA says it may have taped over the only high-resolution video of the Apollo 11 mission but the moon landing has never looked better — thanks to digitally refurbished footage unveiled overnight.
Although the original live video was ghostlike and grainy, NASA and a Hollywood film restoration company took television video copies of what Apollo 11 beamed to Earth on July 20, 1969, and made the pictures look sharper.
The pictures themselves are not new, but some details are.
Originally, Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen — the refurbished video shows his visor and a reflection in it.
The 50-second clip shows the famous moment the astronaut walks down the steps and mouths the words: "It's one small step for man … one giant leap for mankind."
But the new footage also reveals a brief earlier discussion between Armstrong and Mission Control about the distance to the moon's surface.
Armstrong says he needs to take a "little jump" but describes the drop as "adequate".
"Okay Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now," says a voice from Mission Control.
But as NASA proudly released the new enhanced footage, it admitted it had probably erased the original high-quality version of the moon landing sometime during the 1970s and 1980s.
The original videos beamed to earth were stored on giant reels of tapes that contained 15 minutes of video along with 13 other channels of live data from the moon.
NASA later had a shortage of the tapes and erased about 200,000 of those tapes and reused them.
The space agency said it was likely the footage was taped over with electronic data from a satellite or a later moon mission.
"I don't think anyone in the NASA organisation did anything wrong," Apollo-era video engineer Dick Nafzger told The Guardian.
"It slipped through the cracks — and nobody's happy about it."
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/838535/original-moon-landing-footage-taped-over
NASA says it may have taped over the only high-resolution video of the Apollo 11 mission but the moon landing has never looked better — thanks to digitally refurbished footage unveiled overnight.
Although the original live video was ghostlike and grainy, NASA and a Hollywood film restoration company took television video copies of what Apollo 11 beamed to Earth on July 20, 1969, and made the pictures look sharper.
The pictures themselves are not new, but some details are.
Originally, Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen — the refurbished video shows his visor and a reflection in it.
The 50-second clip shows the famous moment the astronaut walks down the steps and mouths the words: "It's one small step for man … one giant leap for mankind."
But the new footage also reveals a brief earlier discussion between Armstrong and Mission Control about the distance to the moon's surface.
Armstrong says he needs to take a "little jump" but describes the drop as "adequate".
"Okay Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now," says a voice from Mission Control.
But as NASA proudly released the new enhanced footage, it admitted it had probably erased the original high-quality version of the moon landing sometime during the 1970s and 1980s.
The original videos beamed to earth were stored on giant reels of tapes that contained 15 minutes of video along with 13 other channels of live data from the moon.
NASA later had a shortage of the tapes and erased about 200,000 of those tapes and reused them.
The space agency said it was likely the footage was taped over with electronic data from a satellite or a later moon mission.
"I don't think anyone in the NASA organisation did anything wrong," Apollo-era video engineer Dick Nafzger told The Guardian.
"It slipped through the cracks — and nobody's happy about it."
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/838535/original-moon-landing-footage-taped-over