Mini-lab in SPACE! (1966 Lunar orbiter camera)

[Marco B]

Hi all,

Just going through the George Eastman House website's Podcast section, I noticed there is also a film of the 1966 Lunar Orbiter Camera that was used to map the moon's surface in preparation for the moon landings.

Now this camera was quite an amazing thing, it was a camera / mini lab (develop + dry, well actually kind of Polaroid stuff) AND scanner in one! And just 35 pounds... Of course they just couldn't produce a high enough resolution digital chip at the time, and getting the film back from space was probably to costly too, so after scanning, it got send back. Amazing.

Well, probably PE can comment on this camera too, it was build by Eastman Kodak and PE was involved in the space stuff...

It was fun watching this movie:

ONE BIG TIP: if you click the "ITunes" button beneath the player and have ITunes installed, you will be able to download a higher resolution video with bigger screen size and better image detail.

http://www.eastmanhouse.org/

and than go to the "Podcast" section and scroll down, there you will find it.

Marco

 

[Photo Engineer]

Marco;

Last time I was there, they had the BiMat processor and camera assembly on display off the main entrance. It was quite an impressive machine. There is a photo of it somewhere that I ran across recently. I'll have to look it up. It might be in the podcast you mention, but I saw the thing there in person just recently and saw the guts of the processor in action.

Thanks for looking it up.

PE

 

[AgX]

Once both super powers had the idea to have manned spy stations in space. The US one never left ground. The Soviet one did make it into space. That station had a film processor on board. If I remember right the film cartridge was manually inserted into the processor.

 

[AgX]

http://podcast.eastmanhouse.org/the-lunar-orbiter-camera/