Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project – needs a boost to cross the finish line

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, underway since 2008, is crowd-funding the completion of the processing of images of the Moon taken by five early unmanned lunar missions and recovered from magnetic tape: Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project Last Mile – Indiegogo

Between further NASA funding and $62k raised by crowd funding in 2013 we have completed the process of digitizing almost 1500 tapes, the entire tape library from lunar orbiter.    This has created tens of terabytes of data, and over 1700 images.  Each medium resolution image is broken into 28 strips or framelets.  Each high resolution image is made from 98 framelets.  Each framelet is a file. We have over 107,000 of these files.  

Our task is to complete the processing of these files and publish them to the NASA  website where they will be free for everyone to enjoy.  We are also doing the paperwork to get the raw data and images to the National Space Science Data Center.   We had estimated the cost to NASA to complete this at about $400,000 dollars, of which they provided $300k after we finished the work from the 2013 crowd funded effort.  We originally thought that we were only going to get Lunar Orbiter II and III, but because of our previous crowd funded effort, we were able to leverage the additional $300k.  That puts us at about $100k short of what we needed to finish, and that is what we are asking you, the crowd funding community to help us with.  This gets us our very last mile to finish everything.  To see what we have done so far, here is our gallery at NASA Ames Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute web site: sservi.nasa.gov/LOIRP/loirp_gallery/