Scientists recover photos from polar weather satellite 60s

50 years ago a modest American weather satellite Nimbus-1 entered the sun-synchronous orbit near the Arctic and started making first photos that by today's standards look scary: it is black and white grainy pictures. After the first six more were launched meteorological satellite series Nimbus.

American meteorologist David Gallagher (David Gallaher) at the time was 8 years old, and he had no idea that half a century later, he will need photos from these satellites. Their value is extremely high, because they recorded sea ice conditions in different regions of the Arctic and Antarctic for 17 years before scientists began to conduct official chronicle ice conditions.

However, to extract and restore the pictures turned out to be very difficult, пишет Barent Observer. First Gallagher made a request to the National Climatic Data Center and asked them to send a satellite image of Greenland 60s, but only laughed at him. He was told that no one tried to classify these records. If he wants to see the photos, you'll need to scan the film.

As it turned out, all the pictures from that time were stored in 25 boxes filled with 60-meter tapes. It was not even the original image. Using the technology of the time, scientists have recorded on magnetic tape pictures, and then run it on the TV to watch - and took pictures from the screen!

Each film signed by the coordinates of the satellite at the time of the shooting.

For digitizing Gallagher sent the film in Montreal company JBI, which took over the digitization of each coil 10 dollars (it is hoped that it was not personal money scientist). As a result, he received about 200 000 photographs volume of several gigabytes. Content 25 boxes together on a stick.

This is truly a unique data on the state of sea ice, which now laid out in the open access .

David has plans to release other data that are hidden from the scientific community and gathering dust somewhere in the archives on the old media.

For example, recently been decoded pictures from the Martian station "Viking» (1976-1982).



Source: geektimes.ru/post/240284/