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Faulty Tape Recorder Hinders Retrieval of Galileo
Sponge! writes "In an article on space.com, NASA scientists struggled to get a balky tape recorder to work last Tuesday so they could retrieve some of the final data gathered by the aging Galileo spacecraft. It would be sad to see something like this prevent us from getting the data that we've waited so long for, and may have to wait even longer."
Galileo's main mission ended FIVE YEARS AGO. It was only designed to operate and collecto data for two years. It's lasted SEVEN years and everything garnered since then has been icing on the cake. They knew it was nearly dead, and that's why they were calling this the final mission. So it's not like this was the only thing Galieo had to do and failed (I know all the mars-lander nasa bashers will appear).
Why did they even use a tape recorder in the first place? Could they not use other mediums that do not degrade?
Egads man, it was launched from the space shuttle in 1989, which most likely means that the original specs were based upon early to mid-80's technology. At that time, other mediums were either too limited in storage capacity, too heavy, too costly, or too difficult to be properly ruggedized for a trip into space. Weight and size were probably the main considerations in not making the system completely redundant; the spacecraft does contain mild redundancy in the form of a limited backup recorded data in it's CDS memory.