Moon landing footage goes online

Johannesburg, 21 Jul 2009

It has been more than 40 years since Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind by stepping on the moon.

To commemorate this historic occasion, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has teamed up with Internet Archive to create an online resource of images and video footage of all 17 Apollo missions.

An Internet Archive statement says the Nasa Apollo 40th Anniversary Collection features digitally re-mastered audio and visual content from the first manned moon landing in 1969.

The footage was collected from a number of sources, including the Parkes radio observatory, in Western New South Wales; Nasa's Johnson Space Centre, in Houston, Texas; and the CBS news archive, it explains.

In 2007, Nasa and Internet Archive signed a five-year deal to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The material will be made available free to the public, historians, scholars, students and researchers.

Missing tapes

Because the video camera on the lunar module, in the Apollo 11 mission, on 20 July 1969, used a non-standard scan format that commercial TV could not broadcast, the space agency had to use a scan converter to adapt the images to a standard broadcast signal.

This was done at tracking stations including Honeysuckle Creek, near Canberra, Australia, and the video switching centre in Sydney.

The converted signals were then transmitted to mission control, in the US, using a mix of microwave, satellite and analogue links, and re-broadcast to the world. However, the final broadcast image quality was degraded.

Nasa says the tracking stations also recorded video separately onto a series of one-inch telemetry tapes as a backup in case live transmission failed and for review in the future. Yet the space agency says the location of these tapes is unknown, despite three years of searching by a team of engineers in the US and Australia.

Re-mastered footage

The space agency teamed up with image solutions company Lowry Digital, which has restored classics such as Casablanca and Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, to digitally re-master footage from the first moon landing. The month-long project is expected to cost more than $230 000 (R1.8 million).

Nasa says details in some of the footage will appear to be new due to the sharpness of the refurbished film. An example would be astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor which was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Armstrong shows the visor and a reflection in it.

There will also be improvements in four other snippets, including Armstrong walking down the ladder; fellow moonwalker Buzz Aldrin following him; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; and the planting of the flag on the lunar surface.