News NASA Destroyed Hundreds of Mystery Tapes Found in a Dead Man’s Basement

[GLS]

NASA Destroyed Hundreds of Mystery Tapes Found in a Dead Man’s Basement

More than 300 data reels, some from Apollo-Era missions, were discovered in a deceased Pennsylvania man’s basement, FOIA documents reveal.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzakkn/nasa-destroyed-hundreds-of-mystery-tapes-found-in-a-dead-mans-basement-apollo-era

I'm not a violent person, but it's hard not to think that way when I read stuff like this. :compbash:
The fact that they messed up big time in the past with other tapes and also that data is missing from Pioneer 10, is of no apparent concern... quo vadis, NASA? :facepalm:

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Control Data computers.... Huh. Why does that name sound familiar?

 

[Hielor]

Probably had to destroy them to cover up the hoax...

 

[dseagrav]

They were destroyed because they were unrecoverable due to mold and water damage; All that trying to read them would have done is contaminate and/or destroy an equally rare 7-track tape drive, and opening them and releasing the mold would have been a huge health risk to anyone involved and might spread the mold to the recovery environment.

I have been involved in 70s-era data recovery projects and it's far more work than just slapping it in a drive and reading the bits. Even tapes in stored in good conditions may suffer from binder degradation and decomposition. A careful manual stabilization process must be done before any recovery attempt is made, and this is time and resource intensive.

Nobody likes to destroy irreplaceable media, and realizing you have done so accidentally is the worst feeling ever (I've been there and done that), but there comes a point when you have to accept that the data is gone and further attempts to recover it are just going to damage the equipment and/or yourself. We can't go back to 1970 for more drives or interfaces any more than we can go back to 1970 for the tapes themselves.

 

[GLS]

They were destroyed because they were unrecoverable due to mold and water damage; All that trying to read them would have done is contaminate and/or destroy an equally rare 7-track tape drive, and opening them and releasing the mold would have been a huge health risk to anyone involved and might spread the mold to the recovery environment.

I have been involved in 70s-era data recovery projects and it's far more work than just slapping it in a drive and reading the bits. Even tapes in stored in good conditions may suffer from binder degradation and decomposition. A careful manual stabilization process must be done before any recovery attempt is made, and this is time and resource intensive.

Nobody likes to destroy irreplaceable media, and realizing you have done so accidentally is the worst feeling ever (I've been there and done that), but there comes a point when you have to accept that the data is gone and further attempts to recover it are just going to damage the equipment and/or yourself. We can't go back to 1970 for more drives or interfaces any more than we can go back to 1970 for the tapes themselves.

I'm not saying it would be easy or cheap, but I seems to me that after building huge rockets, assembling delicate instruments into probes, launching it with insane precision so that after months of travel it gets somewhere, collects data, sends it back to Earth where we use huge antennas to receive those faint signals that contain the data and then.... we throw the data away.... it's seems like quitting with 99% of the work done.
But in the end this is just my :2cents:, as I have no experience in the field except reading the LOIRP blog.

 

[RisingFury]

I'm not saying it would be easy or cheap, but I seems to me that after building huge rockets, assembling delicate instruments into probes, launching it with insane precision so that after months of travel it gets somewhere, collects data, sends it back to Earth where we use huge antennas to receive those faint signals that contain the data and then.... we throw the data away.... it's seems like quitting with 99% of the work done.
But in the end this is just my :2cents:, as I have no experience in the field except reading the LOIRP blog.

The resources that go into data recovery have to come from somewhere. So you have a choice to make:
1.) Either have NASA spend millions trying to recover data that may or may not work and may or may not be significant or...
2.) Have NASA build more large rockets to do new science.

There's always the possibility that this isn't the only copy and that the data itself made its way to the scientific and engineering publications.

 

[C3PO]

Our national broadcaster decided to digitize the old archives of old audio tapes, and bought some fancy equipment for the job. The initial annual funds set aside to do the actual work lasted less than two months. After the first year they had completed less than 2% of their target.

If you can come up with an efficient method of recovering data from old magnetic tapes, you'll be filthy rich very quickly!

 

[GLS]

The resources that go into data recovery have to come from somewhere. So you have a choice to make:
1.) Either have NASA spend millions trying to recover data that may or may not work and may or may not be significant or...
2.) Have NASA build more large rockets to do new science.

There's always the possibility that this isn't the only copy and that the data itself made its way to the scientific and engineering publications.

Money is always an issue... maybe they could save some by having just one website per mission, instead of 3 or 4? :shrug: Also, "new" science doesn't always replace "old" science, as things change over time (the Great Red Spot for example).
And yes, they didn't know exactly what was in those tapes... and now nobody will.

 

[Notebook]

I was involved in archiving 2" video-tapes when the company I worked for lost its UK transmission franchise. That focused managements attention on the programme library for a while.

The tapes where in good condition, archiving started in late 94, and took about 18 months, think we got through several thousand tapes. They would have been from late 60's through till late 70's when 1" video-tape started. They were just changing formats when I started work in 1977. So, they would be about 17 years old to 24 years old

I don't remember any tape not playing back, though some had fared worse than others, and we had more "drop-outs" from these.
Biggest problem wasn't the tapes, it was the tape machines. We had 4 Ampex AVR 2, and got two working, with the others for spares.

Luckily a company called Spin-Physics was refurbishing video head for 2" tape machines. That was the only part we couldn't do anything with in-house, specialised stuff!

For info:
Ampex AVR 2:
http://www.digitrakcom.com/literature/AVR-2 Brochure.pdf

Didn't know Spin Physics were a Kodak company, here is some of their other stuff!
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy1K-UbbJm4"]Spin Physics SP2000 high-speed camera head teardown - YouTube[/ame]

N.

 

[Urwumpe]

Control Data computers.... Huh. Why does that name sound familiar?

CDC? Control Data Corporation?

One of the finest manufacturers of computers especially suited for data handling back then. Less smart, but lots of IO.

 

[Artlav]

If you can come up with an efficient method of recovering data from old magnetic tapes, you'll be filthy rich very quickly!

I do wonder what the problems are. As long as i can remember (since around Spectrum clones days), tapes were always insert and play.

All you need to do is to make a tape reader compatible with modern interfaces or make a modern tape reader compatible with old tapes.

 

[C3PO]

I do wonder what the problems are. As long as i can remember (since around Spectrum clones days), tapes were always insert and play.

All you need to do is to make a tape reader compatible with modern interfaces or make a modern tape reader compatible with old tapes.

Most problems relate to binder degradation. In severe cases the tape sticks to the reader head. I've had 2" tape break because of that. I can't remember how much tension it used, but it was way more than you'd think.

 

[4throck]

If the tapes had Pioneer 10 / 11 digital image data, that would have been useful scientifically.
Those are unique datasets, and are archived as photographic prints only. With modern processing one would get much better results. Or even restore radiation damaged images.

The sensible thing to do would be to just store the tapes and wait for better tech and money.

For the other missions I don't see the data being that useful.