Long-lost lunar photos get day in the sun

Mankind's first up-close photos of the lunar landscape rescued, restored

Here is a portion of the of newly restored Lunar Orbiter 1 image. The image was originally taken on Aug. 23, 1966 and recently restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center.

WASHINGTON - The old moon has never looked this good. Mankind's first up-close photos of the lunar landscape have been rescued from four decades of dusty storage, and they've been restored to such a high quality that they rival anything taken by modern cameras.


NASA and some private space business leaders spent a quarter million dollars rescuing the historic photos from early NASA lunar robotic probes and restoring them in an abandoned McDonald's.


The first refurbished image was released Thursday — a classic of the moon with Earth rising in the background.



"This is an incredible image," said private space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo, who spearheaded the project. "In terms of raw resolution, there has been no mission that has flown since or even today that is as good."


In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five Lunar Orbiters to the moon to take up-close photos to prepare for man's first visit in 1969. The probes shot the pictures, developed the film and beamed back the images to Earth, where they were stored on specialized tapes that require a certain type of machine to be seen.


Initially, the moon pictures were the hit of the 1960s. The photo released Thursday was the first of Earth from a great distance, until it was outdone by Apollo 8 astronauts, the first to orbit the moon. And a 1966 close-up of the moon was hailed by some media as the "picture of the century."



The astronauts who landed on the moon took more photos and the Lunar Orbiter images were essentially forgotten. The tapes with the images were put in storage. The specialized machines were offered free to anyone who would haul them away.


"I said 'I'll take them,'" recalled Nancy Evans, a former NASA planetary photo chief.
She couldn't let the photos be lost, so she knew keeping the machines that read them was a must. She stored four of the 1,000-pound machines in her garage, taking up half the space there, she said. They sat unused for about two decades.


She said was frequently tempted to ditch the giant devices for some useful storage space. But she didn't.


And finally, as NASA planned to return to the moon, a couple of space exploration fans heard about the tapes and stored machines and went to work at historical renovation. They took over a shuttered McDonald's at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and patched together one working machine to read the tapes.

Woman jailed after 'killing' virtual husband

A 43-year-old player in a virtual game world became so angry about her sudden divorce from her online husband that she logged on with his password and killed his digital persona, police said.

The woman, who has been jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his ID and password to log onto the popular interactive game "Maple Story" to carry out the virtual murder in May, a police official in the northern city of Sapporo said Thursday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of department policy.

"I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry," the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.

The woman, a piano teacher, had not plotted any revenge in the real world, the official said.

She has not yet been formally charged. If convicted, she could face up to five years in prison or a fine up to US$5,000.

Players in "Maple Story" create and manipulate digital images called "avatars" that represent themselves, while engaging in relationships, social activities and fighting monsters and other obstacles.

In virtual worlds, players often abandon their inhibitions, engaging in activity online that they would never do in the real world. For instance, sex with strangers is a common activity.

The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married to kill the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his online avatar was dead.

The woman was arrested Wednesday and taken 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from her home in southern Miyazaki to be detained in Sapporo, where the man lives, the official said.

The police official said he did not know if she was married in the real world.

Bad online behavior is usually handled within the rules set up by online worlds, which can ban miscreants or take away their virtual possessions.

In recent years, misbehavior in the virtual world has in some cases had consequences in reality.

In August, a woman was charged in the U.S. state of Delaware with plotting the real-life abduction of a boyfriend she met through the virtual reality Web site "Second Life."

In Tokyo, a 16-year-old boy was charged with stealing the ID and password from a fellow player of an online game in order to swindle virtual currency worth US$360,000.