Faxes from the far side

October 29, 2015 11:32 AM

Here is the rather strange story of how American-made specialized film was salvaged from a spy balloon and sent to take the first-ever pictures of the far side of the moon by the Soviet space program, and how those photos were then faxed back to Earth, line by grainy line. Long read and/or audio podcast.

(Bonus extra: self-deploying robotic radio telescopes for the far side of the moon? 2008, 2013, 2015.)

posted by RedOrGreen (13 comments total)

I really enjoyed this episode. It's amazing the systems they came up with for getting that data back from the film.
posted by Four Flavors at 12:14 PM on October 29, 2015

I like that the soviets, though they can put a photolab robot and fax machine next to the moon, can't reverse engineer how the American film is made.
posted by Dr. Twist at 12:32 PM on October 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

It's funny how this Cold War stuff is all couched in terms of competition. What the Soviets pulled off was an amazing act of science, a remarkable achievement that significantly enhanced our understand of the solar system. And they shared the data! Maybe the Space Race wasn't all bad after all..

Maybe it's not so different now, NASA vs ESA vs CNSA, competing for bragging rights and prestige.
posted by Nelson at 1:16 PM on October 29, 2015

Radiofax is still in use, and you'll hear its high-pitched warble on some of the shortwave bands. Russia kept using it for its space probes, allowing the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to decode the Luna 9 transmissions from the moon in 1966. Using a picturefax borrowed from the Daily Express offices in Manchester, the British press published images well before Russia did.

(sadly, the only thing that today's rabidly xenophobic Express would likely publish about the moon pictures would be a suggestion to relocate migrants there ...)
posted by scruss at 1:18 PM on October 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

The early US probes used the same system -- the Lunar Orbiter Program sent five sats to the moon to get close up images for mapping data for the Apollo program. They used actual cameras, developed the film in orbit around the moon, and then used a PMT to scan the film, and sent the images back via fax.

Recently, the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has been using rebuilt Ampex FR-900 drives, to read the original signals received from the probes and digitize them. By getting the images direct from the tape, rather than the printouts they had in the 1960, has produced vastly clearer images.

I've heard they want to do the same with the Surveyor images. Most of them are printouts onto small film chips that were then assembled into a large image. Obviously, getting the data in one A-D step and using software to tile the images could produce much clearer images as well.
posted by eriko at 1:47 PM on October 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

In a security briefing I got many years ago, I was told about airplanes catching film canisters ejected from satellites in space, and it just seemed too bizarre. I had gotten the impression that they would catch them in a basketball-net-like device on the front of the plane (I think they showed me a drawing of that idea), and the timing for such a catch didn't seem possible.
So here 20-some years later, it makes sense. The Corona program used the same C-119s as the Genetrix.
Still a pretty impressive catch, though.
posted by MtDewd at 1:49 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, people forget that arguably the first facsimile machine capable of sending arbitrary 2D images was built back in the late 19th century, that commercial & news facsimile services were running across Europe & the Atlantic in the first decade of the 20th century, and that radiofax was a thing back in the 1920's.
posted by Pinback at 3:25 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

The early US probes used the same system -- the Lunar Orbiter Program sent five sats to the moon to get close up images for mapping data for the Apollo program.

One of the camera-labs is on display at the George Eastman House. It's awfully impressive to see in person, and all the more amazing that it achieved what it did.
posted by Capt. Renault at 3:38 PM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

> I like that the soviets, though they can put a photolab robot and fax machine next to the moon, can't reverse engineer how the American film is made.

Dad was in the US Navy, and he said that when Soviet sailors came aboard US Navy ships, one thing that impressed them that they lacked, was the patches of non-skid material near doorways. A lot of metal decking is just painted metal that can be walked on when wet, but leaves you vulnerable to skidding or slipping if you're stepping through a doorway, which requires a step that makes you likely to slip. The non-skid is like a permanently applied sandpaper that grips your shoes no matter how wet the deck is.

This might've been pure apocrypha, but I think that was the first time I considered the idea what it must take to get from "this is what it looks like/what it does" and "this is how to make it."

Then I'd think about spies, breaking into the files of the non-skid factory, microfilming the papers, etc. I should've stuck with the science and reverse-engineering line of thought.
posted by Sunburnt at 4:24 PM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Cool. Thanks.
posted by benito.strauss at 4:49 PM on October 29, 2015

The non-skid is like a permanently applied sandpaper

That's funny, I was just at the Air & Space Museum in DC and they had a little plaque about the non-skid surface. Apparently the trick was figuring out a material that would allow you to apply that kind of stuff as paint, roll it on. Some sort of aggregate solid mixed into a latex substrate, something like that. I thought it was a weird detail to call out but maybe it's what let us win the great 1982 Naval Carrier War of the Baltic Sea. Or at least, saved the dignity and tailbones of a few lieutenants.
posted by Nelson at 8:06 PM on October 29, 2015

This was fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
posted by brundlefly at 2:32 AM on October 30, 2015

> Still a pretty impressive catch, though.

The space program uses helicopters nowadays for recovering sample-return missions. You may remember the Genesis mission, a small spacecraft that sampled the solar wind and returned to earth in 2004. Its parachutes failed to deploy (because someone installed a sensor backwards), and it plowed into the Utah desert at about 200mph, but it was supposed to have its parachute caught be a hook on a helicopter, the practice of which you can see pictured in the wikipedia article.
posted by Sunburnt at 6:43 AM on October 30, 2015