In the lab, the talk shifted back to extracting the metadata from all 90,000 images. Each frame contains a Binary-Coded Decimal (BCD) block, essentially a pattern of zeros and ones that can be converted into a number string. Those numbers correlate to individual spacecraft sensor values.

Leon Palafox, a Lunar and Planetary Laboratory post-doctoral fellow, has created an algorithm to crop out the BCD block in each frame, read the zeros and ones, and feed the results into a table. If successful, this process should represent the final piece of the puzzle required to complete the digitization project.

"How long to do the entire data set?" asked professor Shane Byrne, the project's principal investigator.

"Between 10 to 20 seconds per image," Palafox said. "The bottleneck is finding the BCD block and doing the crop. And there are 90,000 images."

Byrne pulled out his phone and opened a calculator application. He punched in a few numbers, and concluded that it would take more than 10 days of computing time to parse the entire image library.

Not counting any errors, that is. Then, someone reminded the group that the original proposal called for manually checking one percent of the final results to verify accuracy. That means looking through about 900 images.

"That's a lot," said Rennilson, who is now retired and often reminisces about his time working on Surveyor at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "But I have a lot of time," he said with a laugh.