Family Life

07.01.09 | FL News Team

NASA has reportedly located the long-lost original recordings of the first moon landing in which Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind.  According to Britain's "Daily Express," officials at NASA will unveil the new crystal-clear footage of the first moon landing next month.

The original film was recorded using a special lunar camera and went through a series of processes, each of which reduced the original high quality before it was broadcast on TV sets in living rooms across America.  From the moon, the signal was beamed to Earth's closest tracking station at the Parkes Observatory in Australia where it was recorded on to high-grade magnetic tapes.

The tapes recorded at the Parkes Observatory contain the unadulterated and highest quality images of the moon landing.  Scientists looking for other data recently stumbled across a number of NASA tapes in a storage facility in Perth, Australia, and located the original, unadulterated tapes of the moon landing.  

The television images of the 1969 landing are grainy, blurry and dark, leading conspiracy theorists to claim the entire Apollo 11 mission was an elaborate hoax.  However, viewers have only ever seen poor quality footage because the original analogue tapes containing the pictures beamed directly from the lunar surface were lost almost as soon as they were recorded.

Until now, the only record of the event has been a poor quality copy made from a 16 millimeter camera pointing at a heavily compressed image on a black and white TV screen.  If the visual data can be retrieved from the tapes, the "Daily Express" reports NASA will reveal them just in time for the 40th anniversary of the historic event next month.