THis is an interesting project. NASA have early tapes and lack the equipment to play them. I'm posting this in case any one here is able to help.
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A message from Dennis Wingo: The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), is a NASA ESMD funded project to recover the original Lunar Orbiter analog data which was recorded on an Ampex FR-900 2? video instrumentation recorder. As far as we know, we have the last surviving drives of this type in the world. We have retired Ampex engineers working with us on this project but the FR-900 was a limited use machine (exclusively the U.S. government at the FAA, USAF, NASA). What we need is to find any possible source of documentation (we know about the Stanford Archive and have been there many times) for the FR-900 or the possibility of actual machines.
There are similar machines with the numbers FR-901, FR-902, FR-950 that are close enough that we can use any information on them. Please email to Anthony (or drop a comment below) and he will forward to me or drop us a note at
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