You think YOU have darkroom problems...

[Colin Corneau]

This is an astounding story. Decades before our digital era, NASA engineers found a way to shoot, process, scan and send images -- hundreds of thousands of miles away, unmanned via remote control, weightless and with wildly varying temperatures.

Oh, and they did it 44 years ago, to top it all off.

Amazing.

http://www.usnews.com/science/articl...-view-on-earth

[zsas]

Very wonderful! Makes Jobo CPP look like a AMC Pacer

[Newt_on_Swings]

nice article! A terrible shame what has become of nasa and the space program presently.

[Mike Wilde]

If anyone ever finds a book that documents the imaging development efforts of early film based satellites, I would love to have a chance to hear about those experiences.

The NASA camera in the article obviously was neat, but it sounds like a sort of 'off the shelf' product being given a new job.

What I am interested in is the story of what was behind putting it on the shelf in the first place.

There is a book out on the development of the US air forces' global weather forecasting service that hints about the money being spent on early reconaisance birds.

The weather office wanted a more powerful computer, sometime in the mid 60's I recall. There was not enough money in their budget to buy it.

So they went to the air force intel/operations guys, and made a deal that they would get the savings if they could forecast when there would be clouds in an area, so the birds did not use up a fixed commodity, the film in them, taking pictures of clouds when they were 'over target'.

I think I remenber that the intel guys renegged on that deal after less than a year, since they were handing gobs of funding over to the weather guys, the savings were so great.

would

[ic-racer]

We had a nice thread about this a couple years ago: http://www.apug.org/forums/viewpost.php?p=745582