Kodak has played big role in space program
When Apollo 11’s lunar module landed on the moon 40 years ago today, it took pieces of Rochester with it and left some behind.
The first manned mission to reach the moon carried boxes of Eastman Kodak Co. camera film made at Kodak Park. The iconic photos of the astronauts on the moon, such as Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin on the moon’s surface near an American flag, all were captured with Kodak film.
The astronauts also took with them a special Kodak-made camera designed to take close-up pictures of the moon’s surface. That camera remains on the moon — left behind by the astronauts who removed the film but scuttled all equipment they didn’t need, said Michael J. DeLuca, marketing manager for Kodak’s image sensor business. The film brought back to Earth was developed at Kodak.
The Kodak supplies for Apollo 11 were just part of the company’s history of space flight imaging. Kodak film was used throughout the space program, including for shots astronaut John Glenn took in 1962 when he became the first American in orbit.
Kodak designed and built the cameras and film processing used in the five lunar orbiters sent to photograph the moon’s surface in 1966 and 1967 in preparation for the manned landing. Those orbiters shot panoramic strips of the lunar surface and transmitted them back to Earth before the orbiters crashed into the moon, said Todd Gustavson, curator of technology at the George Eastman House.
Today, Kodak CCD image sensors manufactured in Rochester are on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Launched in June, the Orbiter is creating a high-resolution map of the moon in preparation for astronauts’ return, DeLuca said.
Kodak CCD sensors are scheduled to go up in 2011 in NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover and its Juno orbiter being sent to Jupiter.