Sothebys to Auction Rare NASA Tapes

[Hans Tucker (Hans)]

Hopefully I haven't duplicated another thread .. gain.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...-idUSKCN1TT1OH

How can NASA be so stupid.

[gary]

Hi Hans,

John Sarkissian, who was one of the people involved with the search
for the missing Parkes data tapes a decade ago will know more,
but from what I understand, the tapes being auctioned at Sotherbys
are simply low resolution scan-converted NTSC-format 2" AMPEX
Quadruplex videotapes and not the 1" SSTV raw data tapes that
were what everyone was looking for.

When John gave the talk about it at Lostock, the 1" data tapes were
almost certainly written-over during data acquisition of subsequent
NASA unmanned missions.

What was uncovered a decade ago were the best quality NTSC tapes
which were digitally remastered and John brought
some DVD copes up to Lostock. I bought one.

The Sotherby's tape may potentially be a better NTSC copy.
But they aren't the holy grail raw data tapes.

At the talk, John mentioned that those in the Parkes control
room who saw the direct feed remarked how much higher quality
it was compared to that which was scanned converted for television.

More background here :-
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Apollo_11_missing_tapes

[gary]

Hi Hans,

In an email late last night from John Sarkissian, he wrote :-

Originally Posted by John Sarkissian

Yes, what he has is a video of the scan-converted Parkes footage, recorded at Houston. We have similar videos from the CBS archives.

We’ve known about these tapes for many years.

Thanks for letting know about the auction. I wasn’t aware that he was finally auctioning it.

It is a tragedy that the original raw SSTV (10 frames-per-second, 320 lines)
data tapes were overwritten.

When you consider what the rest of us saw was scan-converted
by simply pointing a television camera pointing at a 10-inch
screen showing the SSTV image, how "lossy" that crude process is
is self-evident.

Here is a link to a copy of John's 2006 paper on "The Search for the
Apollo 11 SSTV Tapes: :-
https://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/new...pes_Search.pdf

Compare even the quality of Polaroid snapshots of the SSTV screen
compared to the scan-converted images!

Imagine with modern digital processing what might have been done
today with the raw SSTV data if it had not been lost!

[Hans Tucker (Hans)]

John Sarkissian paper was a thoroughly enjoyable and most informative read, thankyou Gary for providing this. Puts a different perspective on how valuable and important the tapes that are going up for auction are... not very, and possibly not worth the $3M expected price.