Today, NASA released a sneak preview of restored video from Apollo 11! The footage is digitally cleaned from archival tapes, and is part of an ongoing project (due to finish in September) to get all the video processed and restored for release.
The footage was obtained using archival tapes found at the National Archives as well as CBS archives. The tapes were scanned and cleaned using state-of-the-art digital techniques, and clearly show visible improvement. Many of the noisy artifacts from the archived tapes have been removed, and the new footage shows details not previously available.
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…in the last few seconds of the montage you can see (I think) Aldrin moving across the lunar surface as he and Armstrong plant the flag. As he skips by, you can see the lunar regolith (the finely ground dust on the surface) scudding up from his boot. On Earth, that dust would billow up in the air, and travel perhaps a few centimeters. In the footage you can clearly see the dust moves on a ballistic path, barely arcing at all and moving a meter or two. Clearly this was filmed in an airless, low-gravity environment. Incredible!
It’ll be a few more months before all the video is cleaned up and released. I can’t wait to sit and watch the whole thing! Today marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Saturn V rocket that carried the first humans to the Moon, and this is a very fitting way of celebrating that pivotal moment in history.
