Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project for kids
The Forgotten Moon Tapes. A true story near Mountain View, CA, told for kids 6-8.
Read along
Here is a secret about the Moon. In 1966, little robot spaceships zoomed around it, taking pictures. They were looking for safe places for astronauts to land! The pictures were saved on about fifteen hundred big tapes.
And then, the tapes were largely forgotten. But later, a team worked to bring those pictures back to life! One of them was the very first photo of Earth taken from the Moon. Whoa!
It's like finding your favorite old toy in the back of a closet, except it's a picture of our whole planet! Beep, beep, whirr! Now look up. Can you spot the Moon, or imagine where it hides in the daytime?
Quiz the back seat
What were the robot spaceships looking for on the Moon?
Show the answer
Safe places for astronauts to land. Yes! The robot spaceships looked for safe landing spots. And one picture they took showed our whole Earth!
3 fun facts
- Five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft went to the Moon in 1966 and 1967.
- The first recovered image, released in 2008, was the first photograph of Earth from the Moon.
- The data was on about 1,500 tapes.
For grown-ups
Written with AI from public sources, then checked claim by claim against the sources below before it was published; stories that don't pass stay off the app and this site. Narration is pre-recorded, and nothing you do on this page is tied to your kids.
Sources
- lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter
- scientificamerican.com/article/60-years-ago-nasa-took-the-first-ever-photo-of-earth-from-the-moon-and-began-a-legacy
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_Project
- spaceref.com/newspace-and-tech/loirp-lpsc-student-poster-recovering-lunar-orbiter-framelets-from-digi-e13a2d91c77f
- moonviews.com
- planetary.org/space-images/earthrise-from-lunar-orbiter-1
- earthsky.org/space/this-date-in-science-first-view-of-earth-from-the-moon
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