APOLLO ARCHIVE CASTS NEW LIGHT ON EARTH'S COMPANION

For nearly 40 years, the complete photographic record from the Apollo moon project sat in a freezer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, almost untouched, until now.

A new digital archive - created through a collaboration between ASU And NASA - is making available on the Internet high-resolution scans of original Apollo flight films. These startling images will be accessible to both researcher and the general public, to browse or download, at http://apollo.sese.asu.edu.

Between 1968 and 1972, NASA sent nine manned Apollo missions to the moon. Both from lunar orbit and on the surface, astronauts snapped about 36,000 photographs in various formats.

The moon images filmed by astronauts during NASA's Apollo program have never been seen in high-resolution detail by the public, or even by most lunar scientists. The new digital scanning project at ASU will use the original Apollo flight films. Previous scanning projects have been limited in scope, and none have used the original films that came back from the moon.

Mark Robinson, professor of geological sciences in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, is the lead scientist on the project. It's appropriate, as the moon has long been a focus in his career. In grade school Robinson avidly followed the Apollo missions, and after becoming a scientist, he worked on Clementine, a robotic moon mission in 1994.

Today, Robinson is the principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a suite of three separate, high-resolution imagers on board NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, due for launch in October 2008.

One of the most interesting uses of these decades-old images, notes Robinson, is that researchers will be able to compare them with the images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. He notes that, while scientists could always visually compare an Apollo-era photographic print with a new digital image from LROC, having both in digital form speeds up the job and makes it more accurate.

Beyond its utility for lunar exploration, Robinson is delighted the project is underway for another reason: "I think these images give everybody a beautiful look at this small, ancient world next door to us."