Late last month I recall reading a few headlines about “long lost” Apollo 11 footage being found in Australia. These articles, however, were referring to the same restored footage released last year to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. You can read one such article at Discovery News; here is an Australia Geographic article explaining how the footage was shown publicly for the first time last Wednesday (October 6th) at the 2010 Australian Geographic Society Awards in Sydney, Australia with Buzz Aldrin as guest of honor.
There is no missing Apollo 11 television coverage. The original raw telemetry data tapes are missing. As I explained in July 2009:
Due to technical issues relating to the way the video was shot on the Moon and then transmitted back to Earth, the original high-quality footage could not be shown on television at the time. Instead, it was converted to a format that could be broadcast, in the progress sacrificing quality. Unbelievably, recordings of this high-quality footage, beamed to three tracking stations by satellite, have been missing since roughly 1970.
This “high-quality footage” was actually telemetry data transmitted to three tracking stations–one in California and two in Australia–and recorded onto one-inch magnetic tape. The tapes were then shipped to the Goddard Space Flight Center and later to the Washington National Records Center (WRNC) where they were stored.
According to a NASA report released on November 2nd, 2009, the 45 magnetic tapes containing the telemetry data recordings are believed to have been erased in the early 1980s so they could be reused by NASA. Although these tapes are gone, unrelated two-inch tapes of the telemetry data received at the California tracking station at the Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland may still exist.
The report, titled “The Apollo 11 Telemetry Data Recordings: A Final Report,” can be found at the NASA website. It’s brief but an intriguing (and also frustrating) one that I encourage everyone to read. Additional information can be found at the Tribute to Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station website.
