"Movies of Cold War Bomb Tests Hold Nuclear Secrets" Topic

"When Greg Spriggs was 11 years old, his father, a Navy man stationed on Midway Island, took him out one night to watch a nuclear bomb explode in space. The year was 1962 and the nuclear test was Starfish Prime, the largest in a series of high-altitude detonations. A rocket shot the 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead 250 miles above Earth—higher than the International Space Station orbits today.

"It just lit up the sky like day," recalls Spriggs. The warhead released so much energy it set off an aurora that lasted 15 minutes after the explosion: The sky shimmered white, then red, then purple. "Had I known I would become a weapon physicist," he says, "I would have paid more attention."

Half a century later, Spriggs spends a lot of time watching nuclear bombs explode. Not in person of course—atmospheric testing stopped in 19631—but on film. On the original film, even. Over the course of more than 200 nuclear tests in the atmosphere, the US government has amassed thousands of films documenting the tests from every which angle and distance. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Spriggs has begun a program to restore those films in hopes of wringing every last bit of data out of them…"
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Amicalement
Armand

That was a pretty cool article.

DM

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Glad you enjoyed it my friend!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Sounds like what was being attempted with the various tapes and recordings and computer media of the space missions of the 60's; the trouble they were having was to find/repair/program the necessary software and computers the tapes were designed to run with.