8 months ago
HOUSTON, TX - When the 40th anniversary of the moon landing happens next month, NASA may have amazingly clear pictures of the historic event. High quality magnetic tapes of the moon landing have been found in Perth, Australia.
For decades, NASA has only had the grainy, black and white images taped off a television screen with a 16mm camera at the agency as they were broadcast live to Americans July 21, 1969.
As interesting as how the tapes were found is how they were lost in the first place. When astronaut Neil Armstrong captured those images on the moon they were beamed to the nearest tracking station: Parkes Observatory in Australia. The observatory was rolling tape but to get the live images to America required a scanner in Sydney that could compress the signal, resize it for American television screens and beam it by satellite. The quality was severely compromised. When NASA requested those tapes from the observatory, everyone was horrified that they were missing.
Four years ago, NASA launched a new effort to find the tapes. It was thought the tapes were shipped to America, mislabeled and stored in a U.S. archive. Researchers looking for other data accidentally found the tapes in Perth. They were in a box thought to contain moon dust data from several Apollo missions.
NASA confirmed the find when pressed by a reporter with the UK Daily Express, "We're talking about the same tapes," a Nasa spokesman said. "The research team is preparing its final report and we'll release those findings publicly in the coming weeks."
UK Daily Express
