[FPSPACE] Digital archive casts new light on Apollo Era Moon photographs

[LARRY KLAES]

NOTE to editors/producers/reporters: Samples of high-resolution scanned 
mapping

camera frames are available at: 
http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/METRIC_PREVIEW/index.html. These photos were 
taken on

the Apollo 15 mission in July 1971. In the images, the resolution is about 
21 feet (6.5 meters) per pixel.

Please credit NASA/Arizona State University.


For immediate release


DIGITAL ARCHIVE CASTS NEW LIGHT ON APOLLO-ERA MOON PHOTOS

Arizona State University partners with NASA to digitize original films


TEMPE, Ariz. - Nearly 40 years after man first walked on the Moon, the 
complete

lunar photographic record from the Apollo project will be accessible to both

researchers and the general public on the Internet. A new digital archive - 
created through a

collaboration between Arizona State University and NASA's Johnson Space 
Center

in Houston - is making available high-resolution scans of original Apollo 
flight

films. They are available to browse or download at: 
http://apollo.sese.asu.edu.


The digital scans are detailed enough to reveal photographic grain. Created 
from

original flight films transported back to Earth from the Moon, the archive

includes photos taken from lunar orbit as well as from the lunar surface. 
This

is the first project to make digital scans of all the original lunar 
photographs

from NASA's Apollo missions.


"This project fulfills a long-held wish of mine. It'll give everyone a 
chance to

see this unique collection of images as clearly as when they were taken," 
says

Mark Robinson, professor of geological sciences in ASU's School of Earth and

Space Exploration, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.


Robinson leads the ASU side of the Apollo image digitizing project. 
Separately, he is the principal investigator for the

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC (http://lroc.sese.asu.edu) - a

suite of three separate, high-resolution imagers on board NASA's Lunar

Reconnaissance Orbiter, due for launch in October 2008.


The reason the original Apollo images have been so seldom accessed is that 
they

are literally irreplaceable. Between 1968 and 1972, NASA made sets of 
duplicate

images after each Moon mission came back to Earth, placing the duplicate 
sets in

various scientific libraries and research facilities around the world.


As a result, these second-generation copies (and subsequent copies of 
copies)

are what scientists and the public have seen. The copied images are unsharp 
and

over-contrasty compared to the originals, which have remained in deep-freeze

storage at the Johnson Space Center. Even many lunar scientists have not 
seen or

worked with them.


The Apollo digitizing project goes back to the original flight films and 
scans

them in high-resolution detail to reveal their subtleties.


Robinson explains, "We worked with the scanner's manufacturer - Leica 
Geosystems

- to improve the brightness range that the scans record." In technical 
terms, a

normal 12-bit scan was increased to 14-bit, resulting in digital images that

record more than 16,000 shades of gray.


"Similarly," says Robinson, "to get all the details captured by the film, we 
are

scanning at a scale of 200 pixels per millimeter." This means, he says, the

grain of the original film is visible when scans are fully enlarged. The 
most

detailed images from lunar orbit show rocks and other surface features about 
40

inches (1 meter) wide.


Combining high resolution and wide brightness range produces very large raw

image files, notes Robinson. For example, in raw form, the scans of the 
Apollo

mapping (metric) camera frames, each 4.7 inches square, are 1.3 gigabytes in

size.


"That's bigger than most people want to look at with a browser," says 
Robinson,

"even if their browser and internet connection are up to the job." So the 
Web site uses a Flash-based

application called Zoomify, which lets users dive deep into a giant image by

loading only the portion being examined. Links are available at the site for

downloading images in several sizes, up to the full raw scan.


The project will take about three years to complete and will scan some 
36,000

images. These include about 600 frames in 35 mm, roughly 20,000 Hasselblad 
60 mm

frames (color, and black and white), more than 10,000 mapping camera frames, 
and

about 4,600 panoramic camera frames.


"These photos have great scientific value, despite being taken decades ago,"

says Robinson.


He adds, "I think they also give everybody a beautiful look at this small,

ancient world next door to us."