Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Scientists and sky-gazers got a fresh view of the Moon yesterday. NASA released a newly processed 42-year-old image, taken in 1966 by the Lunar Orbiter 1 (LO1), of Earth rising above the lunar surface.

The film tape that holds the image had been sitting in a California barn for the last four decades. A team recovered the roll, along with dozens of others, and estimates there are nearly 2,000 images from LO1 and four other related spacecraft from the 1960s. Since the film tape is now being processed with digital technology, the resulting images could become some of the highest resolution ones ever taken of the lunar surface.

The level of detail seen in these pictures is “just incredible”, says Robert Richards, CEO of Odyssey Moon, a commercial company working to build private transportation to the Moon. Should all the images be restored, he says, the data “will surely help us and other agencies as we prepare to take instruments and humans back to the Moon."

Most of the data has never been processed because decoding it all would have been too time-consuming back then, says Keith Cowing, president of SpaceRef Interactive. A former agency employee stored them, hoping that one day someone would process them. The images developed with 1960s state-of-the-art technology are good but not very detailed, Richards says. The reprocessed ones have a resolution of one meter per pixel.

The rest of the films tape is being processed as part of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. In 2009, the agency plans to launch the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to map the moon’s surface. By studying the images from the 1960s compared with those taken next year, scientists will have a “great” opportunity to look at whether and how the lunar surface has changed over last 40 years, Cowing says.

The latest images are posted on Moon Views.

Image: NASA/LOIRP