William Atkins
Friday, 17 July 2009 19:14
Science -
Space
Page 1 of 2
NASA is making available some partially restored videos of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon that occurred in July 1969. Included in the 40-year-old videos is the broadcast of Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s moonwalk on the lunar surface.
The July 16, 2009 NASA media brief, “
NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Moonwalk Video” states,
“A team of Apollo-era engineers who helped produce the 1969 live broadcast of the moonwalk acquired the best of the broadcast-format video from a variety of sources for the restoration effort.”
And,
“These included a copy of a tape recorded at NASA's Sydney, Australia, video switching center, where down-linked television from Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek was received for transmission to the U.S.; original broadcast tapes from the CBS News Archive recorded via direct microwave and landline feeds from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston; and kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson that had not been viewed for 36 years.”
Richard Nafzger, who oversaw the TV processing for the Apollo 11 mission, comments on the restoration process,
“The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video. The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event."
The NASA article states the complicated process that NASA undertook during the Moonwalk to provide video to the public:
“On July 20, 1969, as Armstrong made the short step off the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module onto the powdery lunar surface, a global community of hundreds of millions of people witnessed one of humankind's most remarkable achievements live on television."
"The black and white images of Armstrong and Aldrin bounding around the moon were provided by a single small video camera aboard the lunar module. The camera used a non-standard scan format that commercial television could not broadcast."
Page two continues with the explanation.
