The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LORIP) recovered and restored the images taken by the 5 Lunar Orbiter satellites that NASA sent in 1966 and 1967 to plan the moon landings. The recovery effort is an impressive story. I first heard about it here.

The digital artifacts that LORIP created are now housed at the JPL. In their holdings there are PNG files created from the original, lossless images. Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to browse them.

There are about 3000 photos in the archive from the 5 missions. Combined, the PNG derivatives weigh in at just under 18Gb.

This project contains the scripts I used to explore the collection myself. I'm not a lunar scientist; I'm only looking for pretty pictures. My favorites are:

• FRAME_1027_M.PNG
• FRAME_1038_H2.PNG
• FRAME_1084_M.PNG
• FRAME_1102_H2.PNG (earthrise)
• FRAME_1114_M.PNG
• FRAME_1115_H1.PNG
• FRAME_1116_M.PNG
• FRAME_4006_H2.PNG
• FRAME_5006_M.PNG
• FRAME_5019_M.PNG
• FRAME_5081_M.PNG
• FRAME_5085_M.PNG
• FRAME_5124_M.PNG
• FRAME_5127_M.PNG
• FRAME_5135_M.PNG
• FRAME_5151_M.PNG
• FRAME_5201_M.PNG

Using the Tool

Because this is a Ruby script you'll need to install Ruby (see .ruby_version for the required version) and bundler

crawl.rb generates two files:

1. structure.json is an intermediate representation of the site structure; it speeds up processing
2. image_urls.txt is a list of absolute URLs for the PNGs

One way to download all the images is to use wget

wget -i image_urls.txt