The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/lost-lunar-photos-recovered-by-great-feats-of-hackerdom-developed-at-a-mcdonalds/

by waterlesscloud • 12 years ago

121 15 12 years ago

xemoka• 12 years ago

Wired seems to often not include links directly to whom they're writing about. Check out the LOIRP at http://www.moonviews.com/ and find some of the original images they've recovered... along with lots of other great information.

rkuykendall-com• 12 years ago

Traditionally-print publications have a huge problem with linking to whatever they are talking about. I've seen articles about a video which don't link to the video the article is about.

subdane• 12 years ago

New York Times is getting better about this, I've been surprised to regularly see links to Youtube videos in their articles!

dublinben• 12 years ago

It's even worse when a publication has hyperlinks in seemingly-relevant places, but they're just a link to that keyword on their own site.

chris_va• 12 years ago

Interestingly, this is often because writers are not allowed to add links. Links are the domain of the editors, which is a separate union.

Blogs get around this by not being published "articles", so the author can add their own linking. This is one reason why "blogs" are called out so explicitly on news websites.

ColinDabritz• 12 years ago

This is amazing work, beautiful pictures. See also, their ISEE-3 Reboot project: http://www.rockethub.com/42228

sp3322• 12 years ago

Submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7636013

roywiggins• 12 years ago

Honestly I'd love to know what tech they used to print the images out back in 1967.

neckro23• 12 years ago

Here you go: http://www.moonviews.com/2012/06/printing-the-moon.html

watson• 12 years ago

This have been an ongoing project for many years and a lot of really nice articles have come out over the years. I remember once seeing a lot of nice photographs from the old McDonalds restaurant that showed some nice details about their setup.

The guys even have their own Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_Pr...

_random_• 12 years ago

When you spend that much money on a scientific project (Lunar program) you should get as much PR as possible.

sp3322• 12 years ago

So, how do I get a wall-sized print of these?

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

Between 1966 and ’67, five Lunar Orbiters snapped pictures onto 70mm film from about 30 miles above the moon. The satellites were sent mainly to scout potential landing sites for manned moon missions. Each satellite would point its dual lens Kodak camera at a target, snap a picture, then develop the photograph. High- and low-resolution photos were then scanned into strips called framelets using something akin to an old fax machine reader.

Before they were doing this, spy satellites would hurl the data back to Earth in a capsule, then use a plane to try and pick it out of mid-air. You had to wear gloves when pulling it into the plane's cargo hold, the capsule would have been searingly hot. One time the recovery crew saw a Soviet submarine in the waves beneath them, from then on they stuck to radio transmissions only.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)

picea• 12 years ago

I found the 2009 Computerworld article worth reading too.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9134771/The_lost_NASA...

ballard• 12 years ago

BusinessWeek (2013) also has a video interview at McMoon:

http://businessweek.com/videos/2013-08-15/abandoned-mcdonald...

Also yelp reviews of the former McD's (map position is wrong)

http://yelp.com/biz/mcdonalds-mountain-view-4

Correct map locating McMoon (green arrow):

http://goo.gl/maps/LhQGw

The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos

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