NASA's Forgotten Tapes

In the mid 1960s, NASA launched the first of five lunar orbiters. Each one transmitted hundreds of images of the moon's surface back to Earth, which NASA recorded onto miles of analog tape. It was state of the art technology for the 1960s. But today, it's mostly forgotten. For the last 40 years, the tapes from the Lunar Orbiter missions have collected dust in a warehouse, and the computer drives that could read them have gone the way of the dinosaurs. In this podcast, we talked to Dennis Wingo, an engineer who's working to recover the images from the now-obsolete tapes. Podcast produced by David Levin. NOVA is produced by WGBH in Boston. Funding for NOVA is provided by ExxonMobil, David H. Koch, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and public television viewers.