Browse original moon landing pictures at http://apollo.sese.asu.edu

A joint NASA-Arizona State University collaboration is making the historic photographs of mans first landing on the moon accessible on the Internet to both researchers and the general public.

Washington, Aug 29 : A joint NASA-Arizona State University collaboration is making the historic photographs of man's first landing on the moon accessible on the Internet to both researchers and the general public.

The new digital archive available online at http://apollo.sese.asu.edu will enable users to browse or download high-resolution scans of original Apollo flight films.

The website also uses a Flash-based application called Zoomify, which lets users dive deep into a giant image by loading only the portion being examined. Links are available at the site for downloading images in several sizes; up to the full raw scan.

According to Mark Robinson, professor of geological sciences in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, the digital scans are detailed enough to reveal photographic grain. Created from original flight films transported back to Earth from the Moon, the archive includes photos taken from lunar orbit as well as from the lunar surface.

He said this is the first project to make digital scans of all the original lunar photographs from NASA's Apollo missions.

"This project fulfils a long-held wish of mine. It'll give everyone a chance to see this unique collection of images as clearly as when they were taken," said Prof. Robinson.

Prof. Robinson said the reason the original images from the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 lunar missions have been so seldom accessed is that they are literally irreplaceable.

Between 1968 and 1972, NASA made sets of duplicate images after each Moon mission came back to Earth, placing the duplicate sets in various scientific libraries and research facilities around the world.

But, these copied images are unsharp and over-contrasty compared to the originals, which have remained in deep-freeze storage at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

These second-generation copies (and subsequent copies of copies) are the only pictures of the Apollo mission that scientists and the public have seen. Even many lunar scientists have not seen or worked with the original photos.

But the Apollo digitizing project goes back to the original flight films and scans them in high-resolution detail to reveal their subtleties.

"We worked with the scanner's manufacturer - Leica Geosystems - to improve the brightness range that the scans record. In technical terms, a normal 12-bit scan was increased to 14-bit, resulting in digital images that record more than 16,000 shades of grey," said Prof. Robinson.

"To get all the details captured by the film, we are scanning at a scale of 200 pixels per millimetre. This means, the grain of the original film is visible when scans are fully enlarged. The most detailed images from lunar orbit show rocks and other surface features about 40 inches (1 metre) wide.

"Combining high resolution and wide brightness range produces very large raw image files. For example, in raw form, the scans of the Apollo mapping (metric) camera frames, each 4.7 inches square, are 1.3 gigabytes in size. That's bigger than most people want to look at with a browser, even if their browser and Internet connection are up to the job," he said.

The project will take about three years to complete and will scan some 36,000 images. These include about 600 frames in 35 mm, roughly 20,000 Hasselblad 60 mm frames (colour, and black and white), more than 10,000 mapping camera frames, and about 4,600 panoramic camera frames.

One of the samples already posted online is an image showing high-resolution surface detail of the moon taken from a camera that was mounted on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. The original raw scan, available for download, is 1.3 Gigabytes in size.

Prof. Robinson said the Apollo Image Archive is specifically designed both to give the high spatial resolution but also to give accurate geometric fidelity, adding that ordinary scanners are not designed to be geometrically perfect - something that can be shown by scanning a piece of graph paper.

"These photos have great scientific value, despite being taken decades ago. I think they also give everybody a beautiful look at this small, ancient world next door to us," Prof. Robinson said.

He said more pictures would be made available next year when NASA's lunar reconnaissance orbiter spacecraft launches in October 2008.

The orbiter will have three cameras - including a wide-angle camera that takes colour pictures and also has UV capabilities, designed to capture images of the poles and determine lighting conditions.

"Over the course of a year, we will build up a movie of how lighting conditions exist at the poles," Prof Robinson said.

"We also have two narrow-angle cameras which have extremely high resolution - 50cm a pixel - and those cameras will be used to find and evaluate potential future human landing sites," he said.

ANI