NASA has released newly restored video of the Apollo 11 Moon landing to celebrate the 40th anniversary of this feat.
Fifteen key moments are available, including Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon and Buzz Aldrin and Armstrong planting the American flag. The videos are part of a larger project to restore more video of the moonwalk.
A team of Apollo-era engineers who were responsible for the live broadcast of the moonwalk in 1969 gathered the best available video of the event from around the world and worked with experts who specialize in restoring old Hollywood classics.
In 1969, the live broadcast was recorded, along with biomedical, voice and other data, onto one-inch telemetry tapes as a backup if the live feed failed. But those tapes were lost, and a three-year hunt for them was unsuccessful.
So engineers were left with recordings of the TV broadcast, which lost a lot of resolution as they traveled from the Moon to ground-based tracking stations, to satellites via microwave links and through analog landlines to Mission Control in Houston.
“The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video,” engineer Richard Nafzger at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who oversaw television processing at the ground tracking sites during Apollo 11, said in a press release. “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.”
NASA TV will be streaming the footage in HD from noon to 7 p.m. EDT July 16 and 17.
See Also:
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- Lunar Probe Sends First High-Res Images
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- Gallery: Oddities From NASA’s Massive Image Archive
- NASA’s Best Photos: You Make the Call
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