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posted by takyon on Tuesday November 13 2018, @08:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the languishing-in-online-archive dept.

Behind-the-scenes audio from Apollo 11 mission have now been made public for first time. These consist of thousands of hours of audio communications between the astronauts, mission control, and backroom support staff recorded by NASA over the course of the entire mission. The tapes have been in storage for decades with only a small fraction previously made public. The original motivation for digging them out was simply to find a large set of audio data to help develop tools for assessing how teams work together. However, now that they are digitized they have been made available online for general use, education, research, or enjoyment.

The main air-to-ground recordings and on-board recordings from the historic mission have been publicly available online for decades. But that was just a fraction of the recorded communications for the mission. Thousands of hours of supplementary conversations ("backroom loops") between flight controllers and other support teams languished in storage at the National Archives and Records Administration building in Maryland—until now.

Thanks to a year-long project to locate, digitize, and process all that extra audio (completed in July), diehard space fans can now access a fresh treasure trove of minutiae from the Apollo 11 mission. And those records are now preserved for future generations.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @12:04AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @12:04AM (#761512)

    I see this lie is still making its way across The InterWebs...

    NASA did not overwrite the original audio tapes of the Apollo 11 mission.

    It was the telemetry data tapes that were erased.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @02:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @02:23AM (#761552)

    What audio tapes? They lost the original high quality video tapes:

    In order to broadcast the SSTV transmission on standard television, NASA ground receiving stations performed real-time scan conversion to the NTSC television format. The moonwalk's converted video signal was broadcast live around the world on July 21, 1969 (2:56 UTC). At the time, the NTSC broadcast was recorded on many videotapes and kinescope films. Many of these low-quality recordings remain intact. The SSTV signal was recorded on telemetry data tapes as a backup in the event that real-time conversion and broadcast failed. As the real-time broadcast worked, was shown and widely recorded, preservation of the backup video was not deemed a priority in the years immediately following the mission.[1] In the early 1980s NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage and it is likely the tapes were erased and reused at this time.[2]

    A team of retired NASA employees and contractors tried to find the tapes in the early 2000s but was unable to do so. The search was sparked when several still photographs appeared in the late 1990s that showed the superior-looking raw SSTV transmission on ground station monitors. The research team conducted a multi-year investigation in the hopes of finding the most pristine and detailed video images of the moonwalk. If copies of the original SSTV format tapes were to be found, more modern digital technology could make a higher-quality conversion, yielding better images than those originally seen. The researchers concluded that the tapes containing the raw unprocessed Apollo 11 SSTV signal were erased and reused by NASA in the early 1980s, following standard procedure at the time.[3][1][4]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes [wikipedia.org]