NASA FINDS MISSING MOON LANDING TAPES

This could prove quite exciting. From the Sunday Express:

Technology at the time meant Neil Armstrong’s film, recorded using a special lunar camera, went through a series of processes, each of which marked a step down in quality before it hit people’s living rooms.

From the moon, the signal was beamed to the Earth’s closest tracking station at the Parkes Observatory in Australia where, along with other important data, it was recorded on to high-grade magnetic tapes.

From there, the raw images were downsized to American television resolutions by a special scanner in Sydney, heavily compressed so they could be transmitted live, and then relayed to the US via the Intelsat III satellite.

The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event-the one always seen in archive footage-by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in the US.

However, it is the original magnetic tapes recorded back at the Parkes Observatory in Australia that contained the unadulterated and highest quality images.

To the later horror of researchers and scientists, it was those tapes that went missing.

But now, it seems, they’ve been found and will be shown to the public next month. Woo!