NASA continues search for lost Apollo Moon tapes

Footage of the first walk on the Moon has been misplaced, according to NASA officials who have been searching for the footage for the past year.

The footage was sent to the U.S. National Archives, before being stored at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland.

But now some 700 boxes of magnetic tapes of the Apollo missions are reported to be missing.

These tapes include footage of the Apollo 11 mission with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon.

The officials say they want to retrieve the footage to see if higher-quality images can be produced of the monumental event.

Some footage was transmitted from the moon to tracking stations in California and Australia, but in order to be broadcasted on TV sets in the late 60's, the images were degraded to a grainy quality.

Researchers from Australia are saying that it's imperative that the footage be found, as it is a defining moment in human history.

They say the transmitted footage can also be brought up to the quality of the originals by way of digital processing techniques.

Photography: Worth 1000

Source: Discovery Channel Reports, August 15 edition