Official News - page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: NASA MISLAYS FOOTAGE OF MOON LANDINGS

"I would simply like to clarify that the tapes are not lost as such. We are confident that they are stored at Goddard... we just don't know where precisely."

Oh yes, we've all used that excuse when we don't want to own up to having lost something. This time, the feeble effort comes from John Sarkissian of the Parkes Observatory in Australia, who is part of the NASA team in charge of finding the original recordings of the Apollo 11 moon landings.

The magnetic tapes of the recorded transmissions were stored in 700 boxes and, despite a year of searching, have failed to turn up. That sounds like they are very thoroughly "mislaid", then!

The material on the tapes was shot by a camera on the top of the Eagle Lander. It's of much higher quality than the famous TV images of Neil making that one small step. This is because NASA's equipment was incompatible with that of the TV networks and, after being transmitted to tracking stations on Earth, the footage had to be displayed on a monitor and reshot on a normal camera. That's why the film we have all seen on TV is so grainy.

About a year later, the original tapes were delivered to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were they were stored in a very safe place: so safe, they haven't been seen since. A NASA spokesman admitted, "We haven't seen them for quite a while. We've been looking for over a year, and they haven't turned up. I wouldn't say they were worried - we've got all the data. Everything on the tapes we have in one form or another."

There's a deadline for finding the tapes because Goddard's data evaluation lab is the only facility with the equipment to play back the tapes, and it is scheduled for closure in October. And anyway, the tapes are so old and fragile it's doubtful they could even be played. So the continuing search is really just a face-saving exercise.

Meanwhile, I hope they have remembered to look down the back of the sofa. That's where most lost things end up.

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