Apollo 11 tapes go missing

A SCIENTIST is trying to track down a series of high quality magnetic tapes that record the Apollo 11 extra vehicular adventure* (EVA) on the Moon before it is too late and they disappear forever.

In a PDF, boffin John Sarkissian, at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory in Australia, relates how a number of former Apollo 11 folk want the slow scan TV (SSTV) record of the EVA.

The TV signals from the Moon, he says, were high quality slow scan TV but converted on earth to commercial TV standards, which weren't that good.

They were then transmitted by the three different terrestrial observatories to Houston, and released to the TV networks, unfortunately in a degraded form.

SSTV was of high quality and recorded on one inch magnetic data tapes. They were placed in the US National Archives but 698 out of 700 of them have since gone missing.

There is only one establishment capable of playing back the tapes and recovering the EVA data - and that's the Data Evaluation Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

However, that's going to close this October.

Makes you wonder what a future civilisation might think of the 21st century, where everything was recorded digitally, and no one knows what we thought, eh? Even the paper we use these days doesn't last that long... µ

* YEAH Activity. But it excited us so much when we were kids we thought of it as an adventure.

L'INQ
Search for the tapes