By Michael Chang, CEO of YesVideo Guest post published on
Forbes.com Every day, our memories captured on film, videotape
and photographs are decaying – and even NASA has had to find a
way to deal with it. Between 1966 and 1967 NASA sent five Lunar
Orbiter spacecraft to the moon to capture images before the
arrival of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. Forty years later, while
preparing for the historic anniversary, NASA began a frantic
search for these images after a well-publicized loss of the
original video of the Apollo 11 landing. Figure 1 Image courtesy
NASA/LOIRP Fortunately, the Lunar Orbiter tapes were found.
Because the tape players hadn’t been manufactured since 1975, it
took a multi-year effort to refurbish a player in order to read
the obsolete tapes. The results were stunning images at digital
resolutions never seen before. Unfortunately, many of the most
valuable images, including the Apollo 11 landing site, had
degraded beyond repair, likely due to the normal but damaging
process of pausing, rewinding