An old hard drive has yielded nearly 1,000 moon photos requested by middle school students during a NASA mission more than a decade ago. Cornell's Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility is working to restore information needed to identify where each image was taken and has agreed to house additional image sets as a permanent repository.
The photos came from MoonKAM, an education program led by astronaut Sally Ride during NASA's 2011-12 GRAIL mission. Students around the country chose lunar targets for cameras aboard the mission's two spacecraft, which were primarily studying the moon's gravitational field.
NASA was not required to preserve the student-requested photos as scientific data, according to Cornell's account. Research historian Phil Horzempa later sought them out and asked the Ithaca-based image facility for help.
Zoe Learner Ponterio, the facility's manager, traced the files through broken links and old websites to a hard drive that still held almost 1,000 images. The find solved only part of the problem: the recovered files lacked metadata showing where the cameras had pointed on the moon.
Students help restore the record
Ponterio worked with four high school volunteers this summer to locate the missing information. Horzempa could identify some lunar features in the photographs, but that alone was not enough to establish a precise geographic reference for each frame.
The team plans to use mapping software to match the pictures with locations. Ponterio cautioned that the images' potential scientific value cannot be determined until restoration is complete and researchers can examine the dataset. The project has therefore not produced a new lunar finding.
More MoonKAM image sets have since been located, and Cornell's facility was asked to become their permanent repository, according to the university. The archival work would preserve an education project that involved thousands of students as well as make the pictures easier to use in future research.
Cornell's role in planetary imagery
The Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility was established as part of a NASA network of regional libraries for physical copies of planetary mission images. Such centers once made material from missions including Pioneer, Mariner, Viking and Voyager available to visiting researchers.
As images moved online, Cornell's facility expanded into training researchers to find, process and map planetary data. NASA ended its regional facility program in 2019, but the Cornell operation continues to help scientists and students work with archived imagery and specialized software.
Alexander Hayes, the facility's director and a Cornell astronomy professor, said the center also makes planetary science accessible to students and the public. The recovered MoonKAM material connects that mission with the facility's current work: preserving data, explaining how it was made and helping others use it responsibly.
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