ANI

London, Aug 14: The historic footage of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon has been lost in NASA’s vast archives. The television broadcast as seen by over 600 million people in July 1969 is actually the copy of the copy of the original footage, according to a report in the Telegraph.

Experts opine the original footage could offer a plethora of information about the Moon landings and lay to rest conspiracy theories that they were faked on a Hollywood set up.

According to the report, the footage broadcast over TVs came from a camera that had been pointed at a black-and-white monitor.

The image on the monitor had already been stripped of much of its detail, and to make sure the transmission would make it back to Earth, the images sent from Apollo 11 were recorded at 10 frames per second, and converted to 60 fps for broadcast. In the process, much of the detail was lost.

Stan Lebar, who was in charge of the images from Apollo 11 said initially when saw the footage so blurred, he thought something had gone wrong.

"My immediate reaction when I looked over at my counterparts at Nasa was 'What's happening?’ We thought there had been a problem getting the converter to work properly,” said Lebar.

“What was broadcast to the world was nowhere near as good as what was received," added John Sarkissian, of the CSIRO Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, one of the three tracking stations that taped the original footage before sending it to NASA headquarters at Houston in converted form.

Both believe that those tapes, although nowhere near the standard of normal television transmissions, would still be of far better quality than the one from which the broadcast was transmitted, adding that with modern digital techniques, the quality of the footage could be improved further.

Experts believe it is unfortunate that the original footage has been lost in the NASA archives.

"I just think this is what happens when you have a large government bureaucracy that functions for decade after decade. It's not malicious or intentional, but I think it's unfortunate that NASA doesn't have maybe just one more person whose job it is to look back at its history,” said Keith Cowing, the editor of the website NASA Watch.

Lebar, Sarkissian and Richard Nafzger, a senior engineer at NASA, began a hunt for the tapes at the start of this year. So far, their search has revealed that the tapes were forwarded to the US National Archives, before being called back by NASA to be stored at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland.

Goddard is also home to the only equipment that can still play the tapes, which use an obsolete 14 inches format equipment that was due to be dismantled in October until Nafzger intervened.

Now the group is trying to persuade NASA to devote enough manpower to the search. "For all we know, it's sitting somewhere in a nice, cool dry place, exactly where it should be, but someone's mislabelled a routing slip. I can't imagine they'd throw this stuff out," said Cowling.

A spokesman for NASA said: "We're trying to track them down through the paperwork created at the time - but it's 35 years ago, so it's a challenge".