Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project Update 19 February 2009
To: LOIRP Status
From: Dennis Wingo
Subject: Progress Report, Milestone ALERT! Folks Major milestones to report!
Demodulator
We have had a major milestone accomplished (well 98% of the way there). Figure 1 shows two framelets, from Lunar Orbiter II High Resolution image (we don’t know which one yet). Figure 2 shows our favorite image, the Lunar Orbiter 1 image of the Earth with two framelets that were captured from the undemodulated tape. The framelets that are stitched together are from LO-1-102.
This proves that we can demodulate random tapes from more than one Lunar Orbiter mission but it has also shown us what we have to do to get to full production mode. The demodulator must be ultra stable, however, the drive is still not to its original specification and so there is jitter in the signal. The new capstan motor should fix this as we have new belts, bearings, and the motor has been balanced back to its original specification. However, the the motor driver assembly that we built to use during the calibration process blew some power transistors and he had to come back down (he is in San Francisco) and pick up one of our spares. We have been building spares for the production process to keep the machines running and this is helping with the refurb process as well! We will have the capstan motor on Saturday and will install and align it on Monday.
Al Sturm is going back and doing some further refining of the demodulator design to account for some loss of demodulator lock on the signal found during the testing yesterday. This accounts for the striping that you see on the Lunar Orbiter II framelets that we captured and processed shown on the next pages. We have not found out what frame this is and it is possible (as I have looked through all of the LO-II images) that we have one that is not in the current database as one image is missing from the LPL database that may be ours. If this is true, then we are helping to fill out the complete LO image database for NASA. One final note, look at the final image and see the boulders sitting on the surface at the edge of the crater!
