Digital image processing at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory

Nearly everyone has seen the pictures brought back from the moon by the U. S. astronauts. Less remembered nowadays are the television pictures sent back from the moon's surface by the early unmanned lunar vehicles; these pictures were equally spectacular in their time and perhaps more important, since they gave NASA the basis on which to make the judgements about lunar terrain pertinent to the landing of a manned vehicle. Many people remarked on the sharpness and clarity of the television pictures of the moon, and similar ones now coming from Mars. But to the digital image processing community, the quality of the lunar images was no surprise, and was recognized as a result of the work done at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL had digitally enhanced the incoming television images, imparting to the images sharpness that was sometimes missing in the originals.