NASA may release missing videotapes of Apollo 11 Moon landing

Washington, July 15 (ANI): A carefully worded media advisory note by NASA is being considered as a hint that the agency has found missing videotapes of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

According to a report by Fox News, the note by NASA promised that "greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk" would be made public on July 16.

Rumors have been flying around the Internet for weeks that NASA, after years of searching, had discovered the original recordings of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's lunar excursion, which the space agency once feared had been accidentally destroyed.

The story, as summarized by Britain's Sunday Express newspaper in late June, was that the tapes had been found in a storage facility in the basement of a building on a university campus in Perth, Australia.

NASA's latest media statement appeared to confirm that report, stating that the footage comes from what is "believed to be the best available broadcast-format copies of the lunar excursion, some of which had been locked away for nearly 40 years."

Back on July 20, 1969, the raw video feed from the moon was beamed to the Parkes Observatory radio telescope in southeastern Australia, as well as two other radio telescopes in Australia and California.

The feed was then compressed and sent to Mission Control in Houston.

Because of technical issues, NASA's images couldn't be fed directly to the American TV networks.

Instead, the grayish, blotchy images Americans saw on their TV sets were the result of a regular TV camera pointed at the huge wall monitor in Houston - a copy of a copy, in effect.

The rediscovered footage will still be in black-and-white, but will be much brighter and clearer than what we've been used to seeing for the past 40 years.

Also, audio from the entire Apollo 11 mission will be replayed and streamed on the Internet at exactly the same time and date it was broadcast in 1969.

The audio retrospective will begin at 6:32 a.m. CDT Thursday, July 16, two hours before the spacecraft launched.

The audio will continue through splashdown of the mission at 11:51 a.m. CDT Friday, July 24, and recovery of the crew shortly afterward.

The Web stream will feature the communications between the astronauts and ground teams, and commentary from Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. (ANI)