Lunar Image of the Week (10/07/2008)

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced an ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. NASA answered the challenge in 1969 with the successful landing of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM). To record their historic voyages and collect scientific observations many thousands of photographs were acquired with handheld and automated cameras during all the Apollo missions. After returning to Earth, the film was developed and stored at Johnson Space Center (JSC), where they still reside. Due to the historical significance of the original flight films, typically only duplicate (2nd or 3rd generation) film products are currently available for study and used to make prints.

To allow full access to the original flight films for both researchers and the general public, Johnson Space Center and Arizona State University's Space Exploration Resources are scanning and creating an online digital archive of all the original Apollo flight films. Through this online interface, users may browse through the archive and download any of the images. This web site also provides a suite of resources regarding the images and the cameras that were used during the Apollo program. Finally, the scanning process is estimated to take three years with the first production scans recorded in late June 2007.

Current Project Status

As of 10/06/2008, 32 Apollo 16 Metric frames have been added to the published collection of Metric images available via the Image Map interface. This initial release of Apollo 16 Metrics does have some issues, most notably the ghost (white) fiducial marks at the top and right of the frame, and the frame orientation. It was more important to make these frames available, while the noted issues are resolved. Future releases will correct the indicated problems. The Image Map interface has also been changed to allow viewing Metrics by orbit, making selecting a frame from our ever-growing image collection more intuitive.

Space Exploration Resources

LPI