October is American Archives Month. To celebrate, we are highlighting our staff around the country and their favorite records from the holdings in the National Archives. Today’s staff member is Heidi Holmstrom, a Motion Picture Preservation Specialist at the National Archives at College Park. Her favorite record is a NASA film titled Close Up of the Moon, A Look at Lunar Orbiter. The item number is 255-HQ-169. It is located on the National Archives Youtube page: youtube/watch?v=wEnRn8OEXW0. Here’s what Heidi says about her favorite record: I love this record because it combines so many fascinating things into one film. The Lunar Orbiter satellites were an essential component in NASAs moon landing program, helping the agency to identify and choose among potential Lunar landing sites. The satellites each carried an automated, self-contained film lab to develop the large-format photographs they shot. As part of my job at NARA includes running a film processor, I loved learning that we sent five of them to orbit the Moon! The photographs were scanned line-by-line and beamed back to Earth. There is an exciting recovery effort underway at NASA to read this data from magnetic tapes and make these high resolution images accessible for the first time in decades. (The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Programs website can be found here: moonviews/) The film does a good job of telling the story of the Lunar Orbiter and effectively uses models to show what the satellites journey and operations would look like. You cant come away from it without rooting for Lunar Orbiter! The Online Public Access entry is at research.archives.gov/description/1257288. A blog post with some information about the record is here: blogs.archives.gov/unwritten-record/2014/07/16/stepping-stones-to-the-moon/
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 13:00:01 +0000
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