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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