Last week, John Anderson, a media technician working on the project, loaded the final reel of film onto an automated scanning machine on loan from Austin, Texas-based Stokes Imaging. The reel contained a series of calibration images taken at Cape Canaveral before one of the Surveyor probes launched.

"It’s been in the can awhile," Anderson said, during a team meeting. "The film is curled as you take it off the roll." In the clean room, I watched him mount the reel onto a spindle, unroll the film between two pieces of glass, and attach it to an empty reel. A bright light was positioned under the two pieces of glass, and an overhead camera snapped an image of each backlit photo as the film gently spooled through, stopping one frame at a time. Anderson observed the process carefully, occasionally fine-tuning each frame before the shutter clicked.

It was a tedious process. The bulk of the scanning was done by Anderson, LPL's Maria Schuchardt, and a graduate student that pitched in earlier during the project. The team originally estimated there were 87,000 images, but they acquired more reels from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, bringing the total up to about 93,700. Of those images, Anderson estimates 92,000 are usable, valid pictures from the lunar surface.

I asked Anderson for the size of the raw image cache. Sitting behind a dual-screen Apple computer in LPL's Space Imagery Center, he selected the project folders and tried to open a properties window to get the number. We waited for several minutes as the computer's hard drives grinded away, struggling to come up with an estimate. We finally gave up. (Anderson estimates the figure is about 5 terabytes.)

Though the team has mostly been busy scanning, Anderson has found a few minutes here and there to play with the raw data. He created an algorithm to normalize the brightness levels across a set of frames, and has been able to stitch together part of a mosaic from Surveyor 5 that contains 70 images thus far. Because the raw files are so big, he had to make intermediate mosaics first, and then stitch those together. Here’s an early draft: