Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 19:27:30 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] =?UTF-8?B?VW5maW5pc2hlZCBidXNpbmVzczogVGhlIEhhY2tlcnMgV2hvIFJlY28=? =?UTF-8?B?dmVyZWQgTkFTQeKAmXMgTG9zdCBMdW5hciBQaG90b3M=?=
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Excerpt:
Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA\342\200\231s Ames
Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old
McDonald\342\200\231s. You won\342\200\231t get a burger there, though\342\200\223its cash registers and
soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers
run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who\342\200\231ve rechristened the place
McMoon\342\200\231s. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a
mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the \342\200\23060s by a
quintet of scuttled lunar satellites.

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000
pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first
high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon,
including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). Thanks to
the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it\342\200\231s being
seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible.

\342\200\234We\342\200\231re reaching back to a capability that existed but couldn\342\200\231t be touched
back when it was created,\342\200\235 says Keith Cowing, co-lead and founding member
at LOIRP. \342\200\234It\342\200\231s like having a DVD in 1966, you can\342\200\231t play it. We had
resolution of the earth of about a kilometer [per pixel]. This is an image
taken a quarter of a fucking million miles away in 1966. The Beatles were
warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken.\342\200\235
<...>
\342\200\234Back then things were designed, even if they failed, to still do
something. Today, most jet fighters would fall out of the sky if they
didn\342\200\231t have computers adjusting their surfaces and their pattern thousands
of times a second. Back then they just had to engineer stuff elegantly so
that it worked,\342\200\235 he says. \342\200\234We feel that we\342\200\231re completing the Lunar Orbiter
1 through 5 missions. They never formally submitted their stuff for the
archives so we\342\200\231re doing it.\342\200\235
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.wired.com/2014/04/lost-lunar-photos-recovered-by-great-feats-of-hackerdom-developed-at-a-mcdonalds/>

mark "Next year, on the Moon"