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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."
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.