Previous |
Next |
August 07, 2007, 08:01 AM ET
The Apollo Missions, Online
For nearly 40 years, the photographic film from the Apollo moon missions has remained literally frozen in time, sitting in a freezer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, untouched by anyone but a handful of researchers.
Now a team from Arizona State University, led by a geological sciences professor, Mark S. Robinson, from the university’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, has collaborated with NASA to create a public digital archive of each frame of the film — more than 36,000 shots in all.
The resulting archive will be made available to the general public via a Web site run by Arizona State students. It’s the first time the body of film from the nine manned moon missions has been digitized in its entirety, and the first time that most people, even most lunar scientists, will get to see the images at such a high level of detail.
For the project, which is slated to take three years, researchers are scanning each image at a resolution far beyond the limits of the original film — as many as 200 pixels per millimeter for black and white film and over a 100 for color — ensuring that every detail captured by each mission’s multiple cameras is preserved.
The high resolution of the digital scans produces image files too large for typical viewing through a Web browser, with the largest images weighing in at more than 11 gigabytes. To make viewing the images easier, the Web site employs a Flash-based application called Zoomify, which lets users load only a portion of an image at a time. —Matt Petrie
Categories: Research
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.