NASA restores moon landing video
With the help of Hollywood, those historic, grainy images of the first men on the moon never looked better.
NASA unveiled refurbished video Thursday of the July 20, 1969, moonwalk restored by the same company that sharpened the movie Casablanca.
NASA lost its original moon landing videotapes and after a three-year search, officials have concluded they were probably erased. That 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 40 years ago and made the pictures look sharper.
NASA emphasized the video isn’t “new” รณ just better quality.
“There’s nothing being created; there’s nothing being manufactured,” said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who’s in charge of the project.
But some details seem new because of the sharpness.
Original tapes likely erased
Originally, Armstrong’s face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The refurbished video shows his visor and a reflection in it.
The $230,000 US refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a months-long project, and only 40 per cent of the work has been done.
But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder, which includes the face visor image; Buzz Aldrin walking down the ladder; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; and the planting of the flag on the moon.
The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tapes that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with 13 other channels of live data from the moon. In the 1970s and 1980s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes and erased about 200,000 tapes and reused them. That’s apparently what happened to the famous moon landing footage.
Nafzger praised the restored work for its crispness. The restoration company, Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., also refurbished Star Wars and James Bond films, along with Casablanca.
The company noted that the latter film had a pixel count 10 times higher than the moon video, meaning the moon footage was fuzzier than that vintage movie and more of a challenge.
Lowry president Mike Inchalik said of all the video the company has dealt with, “This is by far and away the lowest quality.”
Categories