This low quality optical conversion of the Apollo 11 moonwalk video images, made with a TV camera taking pictures of a video monitor, is what was widely recorded in real-time onto videotape and kinescope. Recordings of this conversion were not lost and have long been available to the public (along with much higher quality video from later Project Apollo missions). If the SSTV tapes were to be found, modern technology would easily allow the production of higher quality television pictures from the Apollo 11 moonwalk than have ever been seen, other than by the few technicians and others who watched the SSTV transmission on video monitors as it was received.[7] An amateur 8 mm film movie of about 15 minutes of Apollo 11 SSTV images, taken from another monitor before the conversion step, was rediscovered in 2005 and is available on DVD.[4]
[edit] Search for the missing tapes
The Goddard Center's Data Evaluation Laboratory has the only known surviving piece of equipment which can read the missing tapes and was set to be closed in October 2006, causing some fear that, even if the tapes were later found, there would be no ready way to read and copy them.[11] However, equipment that could read the tapes was maintained.[3]
On November 1, 2006 Cosmos Magazine reported that some NASA telemetry tapes from the Apollo project era had been found in a small marine science laboratory within the main physics building at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. One of these tapes was sent to NASA for analysis. It carried no video but did show that if any of the tapes are ever found, data could likely be read from them.[12][13]
[edit] NASA news conference
On July 16, 2009 NASA held a media briefing in which the agency released somewhat crisper-looking (and otherwise cleaned-up), post-conversion video from the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, some of which had been in storage for nearly 40 years. They meanwhile had concluded that the reels of tape with the SSTV signal were shipped from Australia to Goddard and then routinely erased and reused a few years later. Moreover, a backup copy of the tapes which had been made in Australia was also erased after Goddard received the reels. There is also documentation that two hours of the Apollo 11 moonwalk SSTV were recorded in Australia on a different tape format but likewise, these other tapes have not been found. The SSTV signal had been recorded on telemetry data tapes mostly as a backup which could be held in readiness and played back later if the real-time conversion and broadcast around the world failed. Since this real-time broadcast indeed worked and was widely recorded on both videotape and film, the backup video was not deemed important at the time.[3]NASA stated that it did find several post-conversion copies of the video that are of higher quality than has been seen by the public. These include videotape recorded in Sydney after the conversion but before the satellite transmission around the world, videotape from CBS News archives (direct from NASA, without commentary), and kinescopes at Johnson Space Center. In 2009, NASA released some partially restored samples.[14][15][16][17] The full restoration of the footage, about three hours long, was completed in December 2009. Highlights of this fully enhanced video was shown to the public for the first time at the Australian Geographic Society Awards on 6 October 2010, where Buzz Aldrin was the guest of honor.[18]
