"The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project: The Value and Fragility of our Historic Electronic Records”

Join James Snyder with Dennis Wingo for "The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project: The Value and Fragility of our Historic Electronic Records”.

During the mid-1960s the Lunar Orbiter project mapped and photographed the moon to prepare for the Apollo moon landings.  Five decades later NASA and a resourceful group of people worked to recover the photographs, Mission Control audio tracks, and telemetry data of those pioneering space probes to our nearest neighbor in the Solar System.  Dennis Wingo, the leader of LOIRP: the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, talks about the challenges of recreating the machinery to read the 2” wide data tapes, recover the photographs, audio and telemetry data, and make them available again to NASA, the American public and the world.  Gain perspective on the value of the data to the Apollo moon landings, the larger historical value of the recovered information to America and the world, what it took to care for the data recovered, and musings on why some things of historical value are saved, and others lost.

A part of the "SMPTE Summer in Space" series!