According to NASA, water from a burst pipe has destroyed
thousand of historic space images stored at the Goddard
Space Flight Center. The basement archives included original
photos, negatives and transparencies from the beginning of
the space age in the 1950s up through the Hubble Space
Telescope.
NASA sells the images to the public for a small fee and uses
them for documentation and educational brochures.
When the predawn accident occurred, archivists rushed to
the scene to try to rescue the most valuable images and sent
them to restoration experts. According to NASA pubic affairs
official Elvia Thompson, ?We called Kodak, Polaroid, the
National Archives, the Smithsonian, National Geographic. All
the leading experts.? Some of the images have already been
restored and Thompson reported that ?they look pretty good.?
We remember when, a few years ago, it was announced that
the official documents concerning the Roswell crash were
all ?lost.? We hope that images like the Mars Face have not
been irretrievably damaged in this latest accident.
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