"Image of the Century" Now Refurbished

By Nancy Atkinson - March 25, 2009 at 9:18 AM UTC | Site News
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More imaging goodness is now available from the folks at the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project

(LOIRP)

, a cooperative effort between NASA and private business to give new life to some of the first ever close-up images of the Moon. When this image was originally released in November of 1966, it was called the "Image of the Century." Taken by the Lunar Orbiter 2 spacecraft, 45.7 kilometers (28.4 miles) above the Moon's surface, the image showed details of the interior of the crater

Copernicus

. Now, through the work of (LOIRP), the image has been remastered to show even more detail and the dramatic landscape within the crater.

At the time this image was originally released most views of the lunar surface involved looking straight down. Little, if any, sense of the true elevation of lunar surface features was usually available. This photo changed that perception by showing the Moon to be a world with tremendous topography - some of it Earth-like, much of it decidedly un-earth-like.

Time Magazine wrote about the image in December of 1966, (

"A New Look at Copernicus")

:

"Except for the black sky in the background, the photograph might have been mistaken for a composite of the scenic grandeur of Grand Canyon and the barren desolation of the Badlands of South Dakota. But when it was flashed unexpectedly onto a screen at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Boston last week, sophisticated space scientists and engineers recognized the terrain immediately. It was a spectacular close up shot of lunar landscape. That photograph of the moon's Crater of Copernicus, said NASA Scientist Martin Swetnick, is "one of the great pictures of the century."

NASA and a few private space business leaders spent a quarter million dollars rescuing the historic photos from early NASA lunar robotic probes and restoring them in an abandoned McDonald's at Moffet Field, in California. This project uses the original analog data tapes and restored tape drives to digitize original Lunar Orbiter project imagery. Utilizing computer technology unavailable at the time the images were originally taken, LOIRP has been able to produce images which greatly exceed the resolution of the images as they were first seen in 1966 and 1967.

The first image released by the LOIRP,

the famous "earthrise image", was made public in November 2008, and they hope to be releasing more "new" images soon.

The LOIRP, funded by NASA's Exploration Mission Systems Directorate and NASA's Innovative Partnership's Program, with support from Odyssey Moon, Skycorp Inc., SpaceRef Interactive Inc., ACES, and the NASA Lunar Science Institute.

For more information about LOIRP and to see more images,

check out their website.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com