A request to Parkes area folks. Help find moon walk tapes!
Ok, this is a really long shot.. There is a hunt that's been underway since
about 2002 I believe, could be earlier. At the time depicted in The Dish,
NASA had set up extra data recorders to make backup tapes of all of the
data recv. from the lunar lander, etc. These were very large 14 track data
tapes on large metal reels. There were something like 5-6 boxes with about
7-8 tapes in each box. Box would be about 2x2x1 foot in size and would be
labeled with "Magnetic Data Tapes", and most likely shipping labels for NASA.
The importance of these is that the original video images sent to earth and
recv. at Parkes are on these tapes in a special slow scan format that cannot
be played on a normal television. The had to use special converter brought in
to convert the slow scan into NTSC (N. American tv format) on the fly. Parkes
was the exception in that they did not do the scan conversion there, but instead
sent the raw data signals via microwave to Sidney where they were converted there
for broadcast to Australia, as well as being further transmitted back to Houston.
Odd fact: Houston had a six second delay on the video just in case something
really bad happened and they didn't want it to go out to air. There was no
delay in Australia, so they saw the first steps on the moon six seconds before
the rest of the world!!
So, at the time of the moon walk, they were recording all this data, voice,
telemetry, slow scan tv. When it was all over with, the folks at the dish
were instructed to make duplicate copies of all of the data tapes, send the
originals back to NASA in the US, and then store the backup's at Parkes until
instructed what to do with them. The recorders used most likely went back to
the US, so there most likely was no way to play back any of these tapes, at
least at Parkes, possibly in Sidney. The big deal is that the picture quality
of the slow scan tv is incredibly high quality to the video that was converted,
and there is a need to try and get these original data tapes so that with the
computer tech. available now, images never before seen of the first walk on
the moon could be made available again! Sadly, the tapes in the US have been
misplaced or lost, but there are folks hunting them down. There were some
backup tapes found at Parkes, but they were of practice missions or non-video
data. Somewhere, possibly in someone's garage, attic, these tapes may be
sitting there buried under 30 years of stuff!! The urgency is that there is
only one place left in the world where there are still playback machines that
can be used to play and decode these historic tapes, and it was slated to be
perm. shut down in 2006! Since then, some of the machines have been rescued
and are being taken care of by the folks that are hunting down the tapes.
If you had a relative, or someone in the family, a neighbor, whomever that
may have worked at Parkes anytime from the moonwalk in 69 onwards, you could
be doing a great service to history if you could do a bit of poking around
and see if they might still be in the area. The two that were found were
from someones garage in the area, so this is worth looking into. I have
posted some URL's elsewhere in the message board where you can link to the
story about the hunt for these tapes, and who to contact if found. Short of
that, in the case that something is found, contact Parkes directly and let
them know what you've found. And don't give up. Not everyone at Parkes may
be aware of this hunt, so it would be best to try and get the attention of
whomever is the Director, or someone in Dish Operations. OK! time to get
ambitious and go scrounging, you might end up with your own 15 minutes of
fame if you could find the only original video of the moon walk!!!
Good luck!
D.
Ok, here is the URL for the paper written about the search. Pictures of
the missing boxes can be seen, with lots more detail as well as contact
info:
http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/apollo11_sstv_search_report.html