NASA need help with Ampex machines

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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Thanks very much!!! Dennis Wingo LOIRP Project Lead

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Reply to
Raveninghorde
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On a sunny day (Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:45:57 +0100) it happened Raveninghorde wrote in :

I am certified engineer on some Ampex VTR. Cannot see your problem really. If NASA was not clever enough to make backups when technology changed, then I _can_ see the problem. Von Braun made the moon is a fraction of time you guys are now trying to copy-cat it. He had a mars idea too. Does the word 'improvisation' mean anything to you? You know what puts me off, an example: Wanted to see if I could write something (application) for Google Android. Now imagine, a small window on a mobile phone with 'Hello' in it. You need to install Eclipse and Java for that. Bloat on top of more bloat. of course JRE would not install because You do not have /bin/cp or something. Of course I _do_ have that, any Linux system has that, and it specified the complete path, an other big money moron software release. Deleted the shit. Now if NASA works the same way, and it seems it does, why bother to help them? They need help, but not so much technical, more on a ahum, LOL

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

I just sent a note to my friend to see whats up with that.

greg

Reply to
GregS

_can_ see the problem.

copy-cat it.

complete path, an other big

It's very simple; technology was supposed to relieve us from work and labour, but our social model hasn't changed. To create more jobs, we create enormously complex software systems that *require* years of university education to work with.

Reply to
a7yvm109gf5d1

I was directed to a more informative page....

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Reply to
GregS

I was doing some reporting on the search for moon landing tapes. Seems like the orginals were erased, but there were some NTSC backups they are trying to play.

greg

Reply to
GregS

e

en I _can_ see the problem.

copy-cat it.

.

he complete path, an other big

them?

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83495,full.story

Wingo, who has an engineering physics degree from the University of Alabama, knows his way around a computer. But repairing the FR-900s was beyond him. It was also beyond almost everyone else they tried.

Finally, they heard about an old Army vet, Ken Zin, who knew machinery and happened to work at Ames repairing video equipment.

Zin was a jack-of-all-trades who'd grown up on a farm in the Central Valley, repairing tractors and dairy equipment. In the Army, he'd graduated to fixing top-secret cryptograph machines. He sat down with Wingo and the rest of the team. "Can you make that thing run?" they asked him.

"Yeah, I can make it work," Zin replied.

Engineering Physicist: 0. Army Mechanic: 1. sigh...

M
Reply to
mrdarrett

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trying to

A pal of mine was running the telemetry at one of the tracking stations when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.

He says Armstrong's heart was galloping like a racehorse's...

Last I heard he still had a chunk of the original teletype log.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
James Arthur

I sort of doubt if the tracking station could see stripcahrts or actual data. The data is usually seen back at Houston.

I guess these are the same recorders they would have had to use to play back the missing moon tapes if they existed today. Thats another story about the Australians who bought some tapes and took them home. Those were backup NTSC tapes of the first moon landing.

greg

Reply to
GregS

trying to

Speaking of such things, that reminds me; I've got to transfer all my old family photos to DVD before it's too late!

Reply to
Benj

On a sunny day (Thu, 2 Apr 2009 12:19:57 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Benj wrote in :

Tell you what, I am in the process of moving a lot of things to SDcard. I just got about 8 hours of movies on a 8 GB SDcard... DivX4, one is 2.2 hours encoded with about 500 kbps, with 128 kbps stereo sound.

I did stick the 8 GB card in the Canon camera, it tells me: 400 pics or 150 minutes video... Now I am planning on buying a postage stamp collectors album (as I had as a kid), and putting SD and micro-SD cards in it. Millions of pictures in one album. You can refresh the FLASH ever so many years by reading in the card to a file in Linux: cp /dev/sda temp_file (not sda1 !) and copying it back: cp temp_file /dev/sda Do a md5sum on the card and write it down as integrity check: md5sum /dev/sda No more moving parts.... les space taken up. Stick in the laptop and play where ever you are, back of the car for the kids if needed. No more scratches on disks.

Only thing is those cards get so small (the microSD ones) that you should not sneeze, else they are hone. And you need to screen the cards against cosmic rays I am told :-) some meters of lead.....

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

minutes video...

4000 pics or 150 min.. typo.
Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Up until two months ago, the largest sd card I had was 64 MB. That was enough when I had cameras that would make the card unreadable. I could not take a chance and loose vacation photos. I just bought a 1 Gb for my newy Fuji S2000HD I got for Xmas. I don't need it for the photos, but it will record 45 Minutes of HD movies.

The missing moon tapes were recorded on a Minicom M22 1 inch 14 track tape. I'm told there was one FR-900 machine at one time at the Pioneer station at Goldstone.

greg

Reply to
GregS

Make that 2 Mb. 50 mb per minute.

Reply to
GregS

On Apr 2, 8:32=A0am, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: >

That 'whats up with that' link was posted a few months back on the Telecine Internet Group[ (TIG). At the time I looked at it and it appeared to be a modified 2" quadruplex transport to recode data rather than video. Ken Zin is also a video guy who worked on refurbishing Ampex quad machines at Merlin engineering. It's no surprise to me that he would do just fine with the data version of the machine. If you brought it here, the odds are very high I could get it running too - plus we have parts and test gear like Ken likely has.

G=B2

Reply to
stratus46

Just remember to make double copies, verify after recording -- and then make a note to recopy them in a few years. Paper is more inherently archival than DVD-R or DVD+R.

Reply to
Kevin G. Rhoads

are trying to

Personal opinion, you may be far better off to also store them as reprints on ultra long life paper as well. DVD may become unreadable far sooner then you expect. .

Reply to
JosephKK

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