LOIRP's "Pictures of the Century"

Dennis Wingo has fired up today's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference presentation on the Origin and Evolution of the Moon with LOIRP's latest "Picture of the Century," a 1-meter per pixel resolution restoration of Lunar Orbiter II's famous oblique view of the interior of Copernicus. Detail from the Lunar Orbiter Image Restoration Project (LOIRP) is breathtaking, and can be seen at LOIRP's Moonviews website.

Wingo is presenting his abstract Monday. Recent breakthroughs in restoring remastered data from the forty-three-year-old Lunar Orbiter project have caused an appropriate sensation, offering up what amounts to a new lunar mission. He co-leads LOIRP, funded by NASA's Exploration Mission Systems Directorate and NASA's Innovative Partnership's Program, with support from Odyssey Moon, Skycorp Inc., SpaceRef Interactive Inc., ACES, and the NASA Lunar Science Institute, and is housed at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffet Field.

The project utilized original analog data and restored tape drives to digitize original Lunar Orbiter project imagery using technology unavailable when were originally photographed (and developed by the Orbiters) producing images greatly exceeding the resolution as first seen in 1966 and 1967.

Lunar Pioneer Networks is presenting direct links to those studies related to the Moon on this blog presented this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2009), which runs through Friday in The Woodlands, Texas.