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Help Solve the Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly
deglr6328 writes "Very soon, NASA will be dismantling and scrapping its only computer left which is able to access and process the data on its ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes. "Who cares", you say? Well, the Planetary Society for one and they're hoping you might care as well. The data held on these (few hundred) tapes is no ordinary forgettable data, it is the complete archive of the first 15 years of all the data returned to Earth by the Pioneer spacecraft which were sent into interstellar space. This additional and thus far unexamined data (the data after 1988 is available and has already been examined) may hold the key to solving what is considered one of the top problems in physics today, the so called Pioneer anomaly, where the observed trajectory of these spacecraft (and a couple others) deviates noticeably from our very precise expectation. The reason for the anomaly may be as mundane as uneven radiation pressure or escaping thruster fuel or it may be as groundbreaking as a clue to completely new physics, perhaps related to dark matter or dark energy. The Planetary Society is planning on recovering this data and poring over it meticulously to look for something which may have been missed or hidden from current investigations into the phenomenon. They need money to do this, about $250,000, and are asking for donations to fund the project. You do not need to be a member to donate. There are no serious proposals to send any more spin-stabilized spacecraft on solar escape trajectories any time in the near future and this is probably the only tenable method we have to directly investigate this mystery in the interim."
1.Deviate spacecrafts from their precisely-planned flightpaths
2.???
3.Profit!
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
The damn thing only supported DVD-R discs, not DVD+R, that's why it didn't work.
I have an 8-track deck in my Charger...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I'm not making a joke. Can't they just rip the tapes to a hard drive? This isn't Star Wars where you can't copy the "data tapes" after all.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
How about just take the data and archive it in a different format? Then it's not tied to a specific piece of hardware.
This additional and thus far unexamined data
Let me be the first to say WTF?!!
This is inexcusable.
It's insane to throw this project out the window..
I hope people will step up to the plate on this. I for one will..
That those several hundred tapes will fit on a $10 USB key? That's what 128 or 256MB these days?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
If we donate, and they reach the amount, will the data be open to everyone?
That is absolutely critical, I will not donate unless I can see the data.
What and miss a great opportunity for a wonderful conspiracy theory in the future?
"They destroyed those things so we wouldn't know what it REALLY found. I know they did! Why else would they destroy them. It must be a conspiracy!"
Just as well, i was away to send a million pounds but thought "oh no! im not a member! theyll never accept my non-space-geek cash!"
$250,000 sounds like very little money compared to other NASA projects. Why can't my tax dollars go to these projects instead of the military?
If the difference of their expected trajectories have no commonality, it would seem to mean either some new force is affecting the craft differently, or each craft has its own mechanical explanation as to why they aren't staying the course.
Do *none* of these craft follow the expected trajectory? If not, then we really can't be sure whether this is a collection of mechanical issues or various effects of the unknown force. If one or two craft followed course perfectly, I would be inclined to say that the rest have mechanical issues knocking them off course.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Anyone care to shed any further light on what format these tapes are in, how many there are and in what condition?
I had a summer job a decade ago ripping 9-track tapes (geophys data) to CD-R (back when CD-Rs were $20 each and a burner was $5k!), pretty sure the people I did it for still have the gear. Planetary guys - I couldn't see a contact address on your page!
It seems that most of the urgency of this could be avoided simply having NASA copy the tapes and the programs that read the tapes to some other system.
That way the data can be analyzed by the nearest interested astrophysicist / doctoral candidate.
That doesn't seem like such an expensive process. A couple hundred tapes copied to disk couldn't be that expensive. Setup a script to do it and cut it loose. A weeks worth of moderately attended sysadmin duties at most.
At that point all you have to do is have NASA put the data on an FTP server.
So what's the $250,000 for. Damn, send some of this work my way.
This is clearly very important data which it would be criminal to just throw away. It's taken 30 years and god knows how much money to gather it all. So why doesn't NASA care about it? Is it putting all it's money into manned exploration (shuttle replacement, Mars, etc.)?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I donated. How about you?
I knew it, they all said I was mad to believe.
They all said I was mad to live in a small hut in the forest with my tinfoil hat, but i've proven them wrong now!
All you people with your pitiful belief in "physics", don't you see it's all a conspiracy?!
Will the data be made publicly available?
Yes. First, the data first must be recovered, validated, documented, and preliminary analyses must be done. After those tasks are completed (probably taking months to a year), the data will be made publicly available, including second-order data products when the raw data is processed by JPL orbit software.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
They have 3 million USD and they are willing to give the extra amount to you as a thank you for your help. Only problem is that the 3 MUSD is stuck in a Nigerian bank and they need some help getting it out. They just need some cash up front to process the transaction. All you need to do is to send them your bank details and some money and soon you will receive 2.75 million dollars for your help :-P
The Planetary Society is planning on recovering this data and poring over it meticulously to look for something which may have been missed or hidden from current investigations into the phenomenon. They need money to do this, about $250,000, and are asking for donations to fund the project.
:-(
Let me sum up: the USA boldly sends a probe in space, at a very great cost to taxpayers. Some decades later, NASA is forced to scrap the only computer that can access the unique (and very expensive) data collected by said probe, because the administration refuses to fund them properly.
That's sad enough, but the saddest thing is: a bunch of passionate guys (the planetary society) are begging a measly quarter million bucks to save that priceless data, and the administration just stands there! That's like the cost of running a humvee for a week in Iraq or something. How does that look to the outside world? like a decrepit country where non-profit orgs are forced to take matters into their own hands to save their national treasures. Well done USA
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Intern + DVD Burner + 50 DVDs (not sure how much data is on those old tapes) = $500 + $15k/year.
NASA is mothoballing their comp, so pick it up and swap, get an intern to switch tapes and disks, a low end PC with solitare, mine sweeper, and DVD burning software, and viola!
Take $50k for management, organization, and design of the process and a year later you have the whole thing on DVDs and an intern who can beat the large board of mine sweeper in 45 seconds.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
They are talking about reading this data like it's encrypted with blowfish, and they are deleting the key. How hard can it be to read that tape data? I can't imagine that data from back that was stored in a very complicated format.
Even if the media was of a propriatary format, it couldn't be that hard to create a reader for it.
Come on people, it's not like this is rocket scien....Um, never mind.
Since when did operating systems become a religion?
Does anyone know why NASA is dismantling the computers if there really is such a potential treasure-trove of knowledge on these tapes? It seems like NASA would be interested in the same type of discoveries that TFA anticipates....
God's will. He doesn't want us exploring outside the solar system He gave us.
Unless the spacecraft is further out than we expect it to be... in that case, he is speeding the spacecraft along its holy path and he wants mankind to study more of the universe.
Yep, the military probably spends $250,000 for just ass wipe per day in Iraq.
If you think this data loss would be unfortunate, you should check out the Earth Resource Observing Satellite (EROS) Data Center run by the US Geological Survey in Sioux Falls South Dakota. For years NASA has been dumping all manner of data tapes there. 9-track, 24-track, literally hundreds of Terabytes of data. And many of those tapes are literally growing mold, sitting in boxes and racks in the basement, for lack of funding to transfer them to more permanent media.
Think about it, decades of climate data , going back to the 1970's, is being lost due to lethargy on the part of Clowngress. Or is it lethargy.
Let's see, three and a half decades of climate change data, detailed and explicit. Hmmmm.... who *wouldn't* want that data placed online where researchers could access it? I wonder.....
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Why is there a big hoopla about Planetary society raising meager $250,000?
You need money to carry out research.
NASA obviously doesn't care much about basic sciences, and is quite busy wasting tax dollars in 'spectacular' but dumb and useless shuttle launches.
Planetary society is atleast trying to make some sense. Why not help them?
- Sh!t
Also, I would be shocked if NASA didn't document any of the file formats used. I've worked on a NASA project and they are all about documentation. In fact, I was writing a system used to document the shuttle booster production process.
Lasers Controlled Games!
As for the data, a lot of people here seem to be really naive about how hard it is to recover old data like this. "Just download it onto a hard disk." Well, yeah, but the trick is getting working 9-track drives (relatively easy) and 7-track drives (much harder) and going through the effort required to ensure you get the data off successfully instead of destroying it. (Remember, these tapes are very old and probably extremely fragile, and you may only get one shot at recovering the data.)
First, the data first must be recovered, validated, documented, and preliminary analyses must be done. After those tasks are completed (probably taking months to a year),
Why not publish the data immediately, and qualify and expand it as they go along?
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I read somewhere about the pioneer anomaly, but to be honest, this theory seem to complicated for my brainwashed eh...brain..
The reason for the anomaly may be as mundane as uneven radiation pressure or escaping thruster fuel or it may be as groundbreaking as a clue to completely new physics, perhaps related to dark matter or dark energy.
Or maybe my mother-in-law is driving.
It would certainly interest readers of /. a lot more
if the data were GPL'd. I don't see any reason why
data like this shouldn't be accessible to all.
Why not transfer the whole data to DVD and then sell copies of the DVD? NASA get to do their research, and other people get to analyse the data in new and interesting ways.
Selling? First, they are making these data files freely available for download. Second, these data sets contain no cool image or anything that tickles fancy from Jane and Joe Sixpacks. So I'd expect less than 1000 copies would be sold if it were to be on the market.
And not that many engineers or scientists are qualified enough to entangle a problem like this. This is one of those precision engineering at first, and then science next.
For those who are wondering about the high cost....for hiring two good engineers for full-time year (two FTEs), it would cost over 150K (incl. a typical NASA overhead). The rest goes to hardware and administration. Yeah, it'd be nice if every qualified individual jumps in to study what goes on with the Pioneer datasets. That'd be neat and cheap. But that's just some utopian thought that is unlikely to materialize (I'm sure there are more crackpot *self-acclaimed* theorists who would come forward to explain away this anomaly from philosophical standpoint).
Yes, it's not a lot of cash in the scheme of things,
but why the hell won't NASA just donate the computer and tapes to a university? If they're going to toss it in the trash, they should be interested in giving it away for free. Put the data on the Web for all, and we're done. In fact NASA themselves should be able to do this inside of a week or two, presumably they know how to read these tapes themselves..
I don't see where anyone needs to raise $250K..??
Please explain yourselves, planetary society types..
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
It is insane that NASA can spend billions on several years of exploding and cancelled Shuttle launches, including millions putting talking NASA heads on TV, but can't spend $250K to recover that invaluable Voyager data. It costs more than $250K for NASA just to throw away the old machines! It's obvious from stunts like this that NASA is primarily a welfare job for aerospace contractors, and secondarily a mask for military Star Wars missions. Way down the list, below "take out the garbage", is "science".
--
make install -not war
Next...
Geez, first of all, matter IS energy. This has been proven over Bikini, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc.
Secondly, it's only "dark" because we can't see it. Obviously, if it's there, but we haven't observed it yet, it's "dark matter." There is nothing inherently unique about it. We're just not omniscient.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
These tapes should be readable on any midrange or mainframe. I own a Pr1me computer which should serve the purpose. Contactinformation is below: Jeffrey Bottoms, 4405 Pease #3, Houston, TX 77023
Just design a space-glove, and NASA themselves will supply the quarter-mil.
"Knowledge, sir, should be free to all!"
~Harcourt Fenton Mudd
Last year I worked on a project which was responsible for transferring satillite images of earth (for weather, a NOAA project). They were stored on 9 track tapes and other slightly better tape archiving methods. 9 track tapes have a horrible lifetime, of all the nine-track tapes that we tried to play we got one to work. The machines that play the tapes themselves are old and constantly needing repair. We only got to try to copy nine-track tapes about twice a month or less because the player kept dying. I understand why NASA does it. My job ended when the project ran out of funding, and this was after several extensions to the project. Not all the data was completely backed up and there were lots of errors. At least the NOAA is trying to archive lots of this data, but it takes time and money. Both of which are finite.
First of all, why would NASA have years worth of data coming in from a spacecraft they launched, and NOT have analysed it? I find this very hard to believe. Also, if they thought this information held valuable clues to a puzzling scientific mystery, they would have surely looked into it. In addition, how can this tape player be the only one on Earth that can read these tapes?
I think that the issue is being distorted and blown out of proportion. I have a feeling that someone wanted to further their pet cause and they didn't mind letting pesky facts get in their way.
I'm not surprised that NASA was unable to develop funding to convert / analyze this data. After working with them for a few years, and with the 'Military Industrial Complex" for more than that, I can clearly say:
"If it isn't in the requirements document, it's not going to get done, no matter how simple or beneficial it is."
I worked on a project back in the early 80's. We were launching missles on a test range. I was responsible for the telemetry recording. We used a massive Honeywell tape drive and a bunch of telemetry circuitry to record at 1MHz. After designing the circuitry to measure and feed the data (all analog, BTW) to the drives, I asked my boss where the specs were for the circuitry to read the data back off the tapes for analysis.
I was told there wasn't any. It wasn't a requirement. And I had better leave it at that. I kind of freaked- how the hell can we spend $100K in hardware and time to record tapes that can never, ever be read ?
The answer ? It was basically butt covering. If something happened they would ask the gummint to fund a project to read the data off the tapes.
I went ahead and designd and built a playback system on the side, nights and weekends. We went ahead and launched missles. We had guidance failures. I was asked to read the tapes. I pulled out my breadboarded setup, and read the tapes. The project team was happy, problems were solved, etc.
And I was put on the next layoff list for 'failing to obey orders'. So I got a better job, and quit before the axe fell (large defense contractor axes fell sloowly back then- lots of little clerk types had to spent their quality time with each piece of paper).
The Moral ? Never underestimate the stupidity of large organizations- governmental or otherwise.
250k isn't that much. Apply with an academic to a funding council/EU Framework 6 (hint: section 4)/etc etc or something. Or get the money out of Lockheed Martin (they could do with some PR) or Microsoft etc. This isn't really the sort of thing that requires a public appeal IMHO, its a 250k tax write-off for someone who'll be glad of the opportunity.
Perhaps I'm missing something special about this?
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Why pay cash when you can barter? I hear a decent pair of gloves goes for around $250k at NASA these days.
.... send the collecting plate around? Try some of those desk-bound career bureaucrats at NASA, they might be interested in getting involved in some science as a break from office politics.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Perhaps the gravitational effects could be explained by the existence of an orbiting brown dwarf as hypothesized by the Binary Research Institute. It would be interesting to see if the strength of the gravitational pull fits the parameters of the companion star deduced from the meteor shower periodicity and the angular momentum and lunar cycle.
The whole point of threatening to kill a well-loved
or historical project is to get funding. See, for
example, the Pluto probe or the reception of
deep-space transmissions from some of our older craft.
Meanwhile, pork projects completely unrelated to
space can never be cut.
And I swear, the Space Shuttle must have a part
built in every congressional district.
As far as I understand it, this need to bake tapes to resuce them was only an issue because of a specific type of "binder" glue used in their original production. I believe Maxell was one of the companies responsible for using what turned out to be poor binder, between a certain set of production years, for example.
That's why you'll see plenty of people having no problem playing back 20+ year old tapes, yet others have huge problems.
Actually, the moral is:
Never do anything for free.
You created a way to read data off of the tapes for free instead of waiting for the need and then charging for it.
That is the way businesses work with the government. Charge for everything. Don't do anything for free.
The explanation must be the hand of God (if not another holy body part). Where can I sign to lobby Congress (by a spin doctor, no less) that alternative theories should not be taught at schools.
Bert
He's not shitting! That's a good estimate for it. Why did you all mod Camel Pilot as funny?? What? Why are you all laughing at me? ;)
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
first I think it'll be a great thing if they can get access to and recover the data, but Its not fair that theyre just scrapping the computer? I'll take it! I've got a few historic systems, but nothing quite that big yet.
"...like a decrepit country where non-profit orgs are forced to take matters into their own hands..."
Err, isn't that the ideal way of doing it? The logic is pretty simple. Taxes are collected with the threat of violence. Fail to pay our taxes then the police show up at your house and throw you in jail and confiscate your property. So, whenever the government does something with tax money, it is collecting that money with the threat of violence. I am not saying this isn't necessary, but it isn't exactly ideal. The ideal is for people to contribute to society without putting them at gun point.
So, whenever charity does something that government could have done, that is a success, not a sign of a 'decrepit' country. It means that people cared enough to act voluntarily, instead of having the majority impose its will on the minority with the threat of violence. Personally, I think the sign of a 'decrepit' civil society is when people only do things when the government threatens them with violence. A healthy society can accomplish altruistic acts WITHOUT resorting to violence or the threat there of.
There's actually a lot of evidence that the missing dark "stuff" is different than any stuff we've ever encountered before.
Dark Matter: Most of the dark matter isn't ordinary matter (less than 1/5 of it can be, if I remember the numbers right). There's very strong evidence from primordial chemical element abundances and from studies of the cosmic microwave background that, whatever it is, it's not made up of protons/neutrons/electrons the way ordinary matter is. It's true that there's some ordinary matter leftover that we haven't observed or accounted for, but when people talk about the mysteries of dark matter they're usually talking about the weird stuff. Best guess is some new kind of elementary particle (or some modification to gravity), which is certainly interesting.
Dark Energy: This isn't just ordinary energy/matter. Ordinary energy and matter slow down the universe's expansion by their gravitational attraction. Whatever this stuff is, its main attribute is that it's causing the expansion of the universe to speed up! This is also certainly interesting.
Yes, it is stuff we've never seen, and yes we're far from omniscient. But there's definitely no "just" about it!
I just donated my $5 with PayPal, everyone else do likewise.
That this much interesting data would just be thrown away is ridiculous. If everyone on slashdot spares $5 that goal can be met or atleast chipped away at pretty good.
...this? Get your damn wallet out!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
If you are one of the few people with skills to interpret raw data for this kind of project, you will have no problem getting the data for a cost trivial compared to your time. Isn't it better to insist on open source where public will actually benefit?
I've got a DEC auto-loader unit that's just sitting and collecting dust.
Of course it's promised to the state dept. of education.
But this brings up a very good point. There happens to be loads of data that is unreadable because the technology is seriously obsolete (8" Floppy anyone?) and not in widespread use. The same thing is happening to 9-track tape now. And it won't be long before CD's, DVD's, and ever DAT and DLT are ancient history.
In the past you just upgraded to the newest storage technology. But there are still many, many paper tapes, 9-track tapes etc. out there.
Fortunately there are retro computing groups that lovingly restore ancient hardware. For example:
http://www.osfn.org/rcs/
Considering transportation costs, you'd probably be close.
found this:
PIONEER 10 AND 11 ACCELERATION ANOMALY
Basically says (i think), that one possible explanation is c is not constant.
.
Danny Hillis of the Long Now Foundation has been pointing out these kinds of problems for years.
Most types of digital storage is not good for conserving data in the long run. Hardware changes. File formats change. Most digital media have a very limited lifetime.
As an example: We have a very good record of the letters that Greek philosophers wrote to each other 2000 years ago. On the other had there's loads of important research data from the early days of computing that's already lost forever.
siener's youtube channel
...the past week determining they don't have any idea what caused the Shuttle fuel sensor to read wrong. So they have decided to just ignore it if it happens again, more or less, when they try to launch tomorrow.
Too bad they couldn't have dropped the coin on the Pioneer analysis for past paid-for launches that were ALREADY successful.
It's funny because of all the cheese and peanutbutter they pack in MREs. You never shit after eating those things, and $250,000 is way to much to be spending on TP for a bunch of non-shitting soldiers.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Everyone's first thought is "what?! all the data probably fits onto one modern-day hard drive!" but I bet you the issues here are financial. NASA can't dedicate anyone to any tasks or projects without going through 3 feet of red tape to get funding and project approvals, etc, etc...
Put the stuff up for sale on eBay.
Some business savvy type could buy it, (shipping may cost more), but then you could sell the data to The Planetary Society for $1 mill and profit!
This paper reviews the current status of the anomaly and describes how the Pioneer data could help. It may be a bit math-intensive for some, but the words surrounding the sums do pull them all into focus.
boakes.org
from one photographer to another: Nice work! Damn fine.
1.Deviate spacecrafts from their precisely-planned flightpaths.
2.Blockbuster movie staring famous Scientologist.
3.Profit!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...I wonder why it wasn't transfered to a proper medium in good time. The cost would be far far less. Don't care about the format, don't care about doing anything with it... just a raw bit-by-bit copy. Tapes? (my C64) 5 1/4" floppies? 3 1/2" floppies? Nothing stored on those anymore. I got DVDs, and legacy CDs. And I'm considering a 400GB external drive to act as an even bigger and easier back-up. And I all did it before they became something you need to go to a museum to find readers for.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Will you please RTFA. It clearly says 7 and 9 track tapes.
But given the obvious age of your vehicle, I'm sure it can be lined up for a stand-in role in The Dukes of Hazzard 2 -- The Search for our Alienated Fans.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
We pay BILLIONS of dollars to 'get this hidden information', and they (NASA) are going to just trash everything soon.
'The Planetary Society' wants to get the tapes so they can do further research 'with-our-help-in-the-form-of-money'.
I have an idea, lets put the tapes out for EVERYONE to go over so there is a greater chance for success in this project.
I am suspect of 'The Planetary Society' request since it implies that they arn't asking some 'big-wigs' instead of common working class folks..
And they (the Society) are basically saying that 'they' are the only ones that can handle this, but that NOONE else can.. ha.
-- The InterNet is a terrible things to waste, arrest bill gates immediately, and shut down microsoft.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Really? Peter Pan makes me shit like a fairy.
So that's why audio cassettes left in hot cars all summer long remain playable for years -- even when their plastic cassettes are warped almost beyond the point of insertion into the players.
This deserves a Wikipedia entry for sure!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just read on page 24 of:
g ht.pdf
http://home.bridge.de/rukiessl/gravitation_and_li
Heck, I'd be suprised if it were that little.
Someone's got to figure how much they use. Too funny.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Perhaps it is because most of the people on the Internet have no clue what they are looking for. It costs money to get a real scientist to study something.
I would have happily volunteered to spend a couple of days swapping disks in order to salvage all this lot, but alas, I'm the wrong side of the Atlantic. The guy in charge has recently been made redundant, and he was desperate to find someone to hand off all this to... but there's incredible beaurocracy. (I gather all the data was actually supposed to have been destroyed some years ago, but through some 'oversight' hadn't been.)
Alas, I don't have permission to publish his address, but I'll put him in touch with the Planetary Society on the off chance he doesn't know about this.
Interestingly, for years he ran the Pioneer spacecraft off a Mac Quadra 950! Check out the screen shots...
Only it was from the Nigerian Planetary Society, and they promised a return on my investment.
The answer is simple. Angular momentum is also relative. The rotation of the craft slightly increases its total mass (intertia) in the same way that an accelerated particle increases in mass. The spin of the craft thus increases the "pull" of the suns gravitational field.
1) Why does it cost so much just to read a bunch of old tapes and store the data in a new format? (A single 500GB SATA drive ought to do it!)
2) There may be no plans to send any more SPIN STABILIZED spacecraft out that way, but there are plans to send 3 axis spacecraft. Why would the method of attitude control have anything at all to do with this phenomenon?
9-track tape drives are stil relatively easy to come by. Seven track is rather more difficult but I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly difficult job to make a 7-track head for a more modern (9-track) drive and use a FPGA or similar to "massage" the data so that the rest of the drive firmware will work.
Instead, post the raw data, along with detailed notes including any pending progress, and let netizens hack the data.
Hackers have WAY more time than money to spare.
readtapes.com
A little-known company in Canada that has very
high success rates on ancient 1/2" tapes.
So, how much just to save the data from destruction and put it on the 'net?
The eminient "celestial mechanicians" can then decide whether they want to see the data on their own nickel.
I didn't donate because I at least like something in return for my money, but I did give them $20 for a one-year membership (student discount). Hopefully some of my money will go towards this essential mission. I've long thought about joining the Planetary Society; this was my final impetus to do it.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
about $250,000 ... There are no serious proposals to send any more spin-stabilized spacecraft on solar escape trajectories any time in the near future
What about using $250,000 to send another spacecraft out to investigate?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Incidentally, this is one reason why it's extremely important to fund university groups even in the era of "big science." An environment where intellectual curiosity is expected and rewarded will be more cost-effective than a mega-contractor with a "what's your account number" mentality every time. Written as a university postdoc in physics...
Surely then you appreciate the irony in the mass of paperwork that comes with completing a PO.
:)
If I hear "This is Form 23B in duplicate, but I need Form 23C in triplicate" from a clerk sitting right next to a goddamn copy machine *one* *more* *time*...
lol! Yeah, I know, I was _trying_ to be funny. Guess Monday isn't my day to be funny. Come to think on it, any day ending in Y probably isn't my day for being funny '-)
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Sure, there are obstinate bureaucrats in most any organization. I don't know how it is at Purdue, but the University of California has a procurement credit card system that basically eliminates POs for anything under $2500. We just order it and reconcile the paperwork later.
I have an 8-track deck in my Charger...
Will you please RTFA. It clearly says 7 and 9 track tapes.
But statistically speaking, it ought to work on average.
FreeSpeech.org
So NASA's 16.5 Billion Dollar budget this year wasn't enough to cover the overwhelming $250,000 tape backup scheme that they had already prophetized for years?
Well Duh.
Don't be clear. Just put out popup and flash ads all over the web: "We're going to lose all sorts of classic 1970s Eros unless you contribute! Click to save the Eros data"
You'll get $1 million just from people who think they are saving classic pr0n collections.
-Styopa
Why don't they ask NASA to donate the computer to them instead of scraping it?
This guy here has the answer :-)
Not only does he explain the Pioneer anomaly but also proposes a radically different explanation for just about every physical phenomenon. I doubt wether there's anything to his claims, but then again, 500 years ago we were sure that the Earth was the center of the universe. If nothing else his theory seems quite consistent (if you can bring yourself to accept the underlying premise).
So are you suggesting that the military go for one day without wiping their asses in Iraq so we can save this data? A messy proposition in the least.
Can't the tapes be put onto a different format, say DVD's...or backed up to triple redundant hard drives. I would MUCH rather have to access a fast SCSI drive then reels of tape.
Ok, now for those who say "but the vinal sounds so much better then that digital crap"...why are they bothering to dismantle this ancient computer? Why not just leave it in a warehouse or just donate to some organization (like this one) who can then play with the data? Come on, it is not like they will really use the parts on newer computers. To take it apart is a waste of money (unless it has national security components, which at this age, I doubt).
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Isn't technology wonderful, we can see pictures in caves from thousand of years ago and read books which have been written some centuries ago, but all our technology isn't capable of doing something better
I guess the best option is to re-record it, ej: store it periodically in the trendy medium people uses in a given decade, that'd be DVD for today.
Estimate 150000 US soldiers and support personel.
Further estimate average of the need for TP once per day per person and an average 20 usages per TP roll.
TP_rolls = 150000 / 20 = 7500
Figure in a conservative typical military waste of 25% and loss to enemy capture...
TP_rolls = 7500 * 1.25 = 9375
Realizing that Haliburton probably has the contract for TP in Iraq and this is to the military and this TP has to be delivered to dangerous areas so a reasonable fully burdened rate of $25 per roll
TP_cost = 9375 * $25 = $234375
Wow! Very good for a WAG eh?
Because there is more mass towards the center of the solar system, the slower light (things with waves and particles) and matter (items with mass) move about.
As you move further away from all the mass, time distorts and you actually speed up as observed from earth. If you were on the spacecraft, you would observe everything else in the solor system slowing down. (I think?)
In theory, one might be able to traverse to other solar systems faster than we originally thought, but still takes more time than we have as humans with current technology.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Here's a project for ya:
.9999 gold coins please.
- Go to eBay and buy one. (wait for the DRMO auction for the 7-track unit)
- Build a box to acess the drive - not real hard for a good hardware hacker
- build a Linux driver to access it (presuming no driver exists already for the card you connect it to)
- get the tapes via FOIA
Conclusion: get the data for next to nothing.
Oh, yeah, one last step:
- ship the 245,000 smackers you didn't use to my house, in
That's because you are a fairy.
Splice the 9-track tapes lengthwise alongside the 7-track tapes and cut them again so they are (can you see this coming?) 8 tracks each. Then go to an old electronics surplus store and buy a couple of used 8-track tape players - there were a zillion made in the day.
Jeez, in the digital age people seem to have forgotten how to solve the simplest problems.
Within the solar system, the effect isn't observable due to the acceleration caused by the sun's gravitational pull, but the Pioneer probes may be far enough from the sun's gravitational influence that the low-acceleration dynamics proposed by MOND could be in effect.
From what I've read, I'm not entirely convinced that MOND would have as large of an effect on the probes as has been observed, but has anyone actually crunched the numbers? They've already theorized that dark matter could be responsible, but I'd be very interested in seeing whether MOND could provide a more reasonable (and less astonishing) explanation.
Nine track tapes were an industry standard for a LONG time. Finding drives to read them isn't that big a deal. I've got about six of them. One of which is connected to a Linux box right here, for the purpose of writing boot tapes for my PDP-11. SCSI MO drives aren't hard to find either. I've got several, and they turn up often. There are lots of people out there in the computer collecting community with VAXen and MO drives and tape drives of all sorts. I hear often of people that can't find a machine "anywhere" to read their old data. They apparently don't look too hard. There are several mailing lists and newsgroups of computer collectors, and it wouldn't be hard to find someone to help you recover your data. Us computer collectors love to have someone _else_ think that our hardware is useful.
And, if NASA is getting rid of an archaic machine and drives - someone should save it! There are LOTS of collectors out there, lots of hardware hackers and geeks like myself that love working on old machines, and could keep the machine operational and help transfer data.
In other words, yes, there is still a way to get data read in, even if you're sure that the media is too obsolete that nobody has a working drive. Nine track tapes, Magneto Optical, 8" floppies, Bernoulli cartridges, TK50 CompacTapes, QIC cartridges, MFM hard drives, SyQuest cartridges, paper tape, punched cards... The hardware is piled up all over the place, in the basements and bedrooms of people like me. Wether it's as common as a Commodore 64 5 1/4" floppy or as exotic as an Exatron Stringy Floppy or a 1600BPI nine track tape, chances are you can find someone with the machine and willing to help you.
Here are some links published on another group about this same topic, and all data that NASA knows about is already saved.
? sc=1972-012A&ds=*
? sc=1973-019A&ds=*
> http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog
> http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog
>Well, well, well...it looks like every bit of Pioneer 10 and 11 has been saved already, and can be accessed thru the proper channels (on tape, but apparently they will burn a CDROM on request).
>With genuine mono sound!?
8-tracks were always stereo.
They were originally sonically slightly superior to cassettes (IIRC the recorded track was wider and their speed was 3 3/4 in/sec. vs. the cassette's 1 7/8 in/sec.), but cassette improvements quickly eliminated that edge. They were more than twice the size and mechanically highly inferior to cassettes.
They were a US home-grown and mechanically dumb nightmare alternative to the more elegant Philips (Dutch) cassette tape. It was a single loop of tape that pulled tape from the inside of the loop and wound it on the outside. The recording industry preferred them to cassettes because they didn't last as long (so they sold more replacements). They jammed often - in the 70's, it was not at all unusual to see 100's of feet of tape strewn over the highway-side because an 8-track had jammed and broken the tape, so Bo and Luke just tossed it out the window. Good riddance to bad technology.
Pardon me, I'm no physics intellect but you're hurling a piece of metal through space at super crazy distances and velocities in unexplored areas of space. You come to tell me that you're trying to figure out an anomoly that happened in deep space? Millions of miles away? Hey, it doesn't take a genius to know that there's a gafricknzillion objects hurling around your little satellite whipping it all over the place, its amazing it stays on your little dotted lines as much as it does to begin with. Why don't you all check to see if the satellite passed through another object's path and time was bending there enough to change the satellite's course.
Naw, a 4 star general only earns like 400k per year. That means that each asswipe only costs the tax payers about 1k per day.
Every action has equal and opposite reaction does not make sense in a non euclidian universe because the equal and opposite reaction is not in a straight line, ie it is curved, part of a circle. therefore comes back on itself, therefore is not opposite.
I think the best bet is the mobius strip and the Klein bottle.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
It's only ironic if you can't tell the difference between a careless mistake and intentional ass-hatted stupidity.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In Soviet Russia, Asswipe funds War in Iraq!
Oh wait, it's the same here...
What if NASA just screwed up inches and millimeters and that is why the craft was inexplicably off course? Oh, that was the Mars probe problem....
The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car why not do it with some style. Besides, the stainless, steel construction made the flux dispersal--look out!
That seemed to be exactly the case, judging by the release. So it's probably more likely that this foundation wants to froth up the Slashdot crowd into donating madly. I mean, no organization could actually be that stupid. It defies belief.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I've never heard of a current-loop TTY interface. Can you tell me what the heck that is?
Though Google tells me it may be a solved problem.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"Will you please RTFA. It clearly says 7 and 9 track tapes."
What I don't understad is the NASA still has serviceable parts able to read those tapes. Why then they just move the tapes to another support?
And then, if those boxes are going to be decomissioned why that charity needs the money? They can just ask NASA to give the boxes and the tapes to them so they can read it!
Uh dude, left wingers disagree with you on a frequent basis
There is left, right, and just "way out there". You're about five lightyears away from the left wing.
Of course, a complaint about a spelling error is obviously 1) on topic to the Pioneer anomoly and 2) would be the subject of left/right political debate. Not everything is a political debate. Perchance did you ever think your attitude and your paranoia might be what contributes to negative attitudes towards your comments here? Of course not, because anyone who disagrees with you is part of some big conspiracy.
I know you don't have the balls to reply, so its at least fun to sit here and taunt idiots like you who don't understand even basic rules of debate or concepts of logic.
hmmm...I was seeing this with 80's vintage Ampex stuff as well, so I don't think it's limited to Maxwell, but point taken...it does vary greatly with the materials used in the tape.
*sigh* We *do* have a credit card system, but it's only for tax-exempt purchases from local brick-and-mortar businesses (i.e., can't order online) for purchases under $500.
And that's only if we submit approval paperwork beforehand.
Color me envious!
Its members are entreteiners like Spielberg and Bill Nye The Science Guy, not real scientists. Dont waste your money, they will use the donations to make a SciFi movie or something.
I've been to the NASA office that holds these machines. They're just old DEC tape drives and DEC PDP's. They are by no means 'rare' though I will admit they're harder to find then they used to be.
Why this data hasn't been transfered to a different medium for easier access and storage? Funding and Politics I'd suspect, the two biggest banes of NASA these days.
... it doesn't seem that donations are earmarked for this particular cause.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
- unveil the mystery of the pioneer anomaly ..
- build anti-anti-anti-anti-gravity device
- place device in orbit and point at Earth
- blow Earth to pieces, creating another Asteroid belt
- profit!
- Ow, wait
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
How much data are we talking about? Are the programmers still around to code up the utilities necessary for reading the data and saving it to more modern mass storage devices.
Obviously the hardware is grossly outdated. But this data should be preserved. Obviously this is going to cost something, but I suspect that data is invaluable
Of course you got axed, recovery of the test data after failure was going to be an additional contract for the firm. By having constructed such on your own time, you cost the company revenue.
No, its far too many tracks. We need a one track tape reader, because 1001 AND 0111 is 0001.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
After reading TFA its not clear if the original data is in analog format or digital. It seems that most readers assume its digital format, and thats what I was assuming too. If it were purely digital, then transferring the data to a new format would be a reasonably easy migration.
I suspect its in analog format - probably the original signal recordings. Which would make more sense for the expense of analyzing it - because you would be very interested in the phase relationships between different channels of data and their doppler shifts. Its the analog waveforms that could give insights into the timing effects over long distances.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
$250,000 to read and archive 7 tapes! I guess they're charging NASA contractor rates. Sheesh and people wonder why we haven't been back to the moon in decades.
Only 30 zarbos? Darn, and I just filled up for 37.2 zarbos!
Instead of asking for all this money why don't they have they data examined similar to seti.
what if there were no hypothetical questions?
Sorry for the caps, but I wanted to get your attention ;)
v enusorbiter - they've got some Pioneer data), one set is in the hands of the organization that was the precursor to our current Planetary Data System (PDS) - the NASA archiving organization (they create CD-ROMs and nowadays DVD-ROMs from mission data, if we own it). Go check out http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/. I think the original researcher got copy #4, and I've forgotten who got copy #3. If we could find one of the CD-ROMs, we could look at the index file (each CD had an index file; it was updated as newer versions of the CD's were produced) and see if any of the files contained Telemetry data.
I work at JPL, for the last 12 1/2 years in the Multi-mission Image Processing Lab. A co-worker in my group two doors down from me did some work on Pioneer 7-track tape data recovery a few years ago; the main interest at that time was actual Science data, rather than the raw spacecraft Telemetry data that seems to be the focus of this Planetary Society inquest.
A lot of the tapes were recovered back then. They were burned to CD-ROMs and 4 copies of each were made. One set is still here at JPL at the Regional Planetary Image Facility (see http://rpif.jpl.nasa.gov/locb_mission.asp?pioneer
As for the equipment, I think the PS is blowing smoke - as far as we know, Ratheon has the old VAX equipment we used to read those old 7-track tapes onto, and I suspect they might also have the actual 7-track tape drives themselves that were used in the reclamation project (i.e. by my co-worker).
Anyway, the key thing is, the main thrust of this recovery project was to recover Science data, not Telemetry. So if someone really wants all the Telemetry from launch up to 2002 (last transmission received), they'll probably still need to get it off of those old rotting 7-track tapes. We probably only have some of it on the CD-ROMs that were made from the efforts here.
.signature? Why, I haven't heard that word since before the Clone Wars
Data are plural!
I'm so glad someone mentioned Maxell - I used to buy CD-R spindles made by those guys (because they were cheap, and I was a student), burnt about 200 CD's worth of MP3's, then after a year I noticed with growing horror the aluminium film was beginning to peel off of the discs. I lost about twenty CD's before I could copy my music onto Tayo Yuden media. Maxell discs - one shudders to think of them, bad craziness.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
I worked for the Lunar & Planetary Lab many years ago when we recieved hundreds of such tapes from Pioneer. At the time they were stored in racks in the computer room with an IBM 1130 system. Track density in those days was either 556 bpi or 800 bpi on 1 inch tape (memory) and recording technology was crude at best. Even then the fear was that the data would be irrecoverable in years. At the time, the lab was run by Dr. Sonnett who credited with the discovery that CMOS circuits were static sensitive. He came up with idea of grounding workers. This paved the way for low power electonics on some of these payloads. They were interesting days.
This story shows how ephemeral digital data are. I applied for a business license today, and while waiting, browsed through the collection of licenses issued during the 1890s. These are obsolete documents recorded on ancient technology, yet well-preserved and easily stored. Any information not recorded on paper cannot be considered truly preserved.
every stain tells a story
I clicked the donation link but the site appears to have been slashdotted, will try again later
A fool and his money are easily parted
Why doesn't NASA just burn some CDs with all this data before they get rid of the computer?
good, I love it!
junk the old tape readres for goot! NALA
(with the emphasis on 'national', because ESA will continue to be able to read my tapes.....)
I do have copies of my scientific work on 9 tracks.
They are still good (retensioned regularly, read/write verified per blcck, etc.).
I'll be glad to buy their tape stations......
Oh, it was first mvs, then vms, now it has been SuSE Linux on an IBM S350 (actually, and Amdahl compatible...) to take care of them.
Aluminum complicated superconductivity within a matrix, who would want that anyways......
Couldn't this data be freed by the courts?
Throw 20,000 idle computer processors at it...
BOINC
I wrote:
? ds=PSFP-00166
A co-worker in my group two doors down from me did some work on Pioneer 7-track tape data recovery a few years ago; the main interest at that time was actual Science data, rather than the raw spacecraft Telemetry data that seems to be the focus of this Planetary Society inquest.
And, in fact, I believe the data referenced on this page:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog
is from that very same task that my co-worker participated in.
.signature? Why, I haven't heard that word since before the Clone Wars
MOND does explain the anamoly, but the paper rejects it because such a force is not felt in the orbits of Earth and Mars. Although MOND specifically says that it only applies when acceleration due to a field approaches a0. Which it does at these distances but not at Earth and Mars distances.
I understand that MOND is not a theory it is just an observation that applies to Galactic distances very well. I also believe that any theory that does not incorporate MOND in some form is missing something very critical.
My simple reason is that an equation that fits observation so well as MOND does to the Galactic distances must be a good approximation of some under lying theory. Dark Matter does not cut it, it is very ad-hoc, it would be believable if MOND did not predict things so well.
I do believe that MOND is not completely correct its like Keplers equations were to Newtons theory. It has some grains of truth. It may also not apply very well to Cosmic distances which the theory that explains MOND may explain more correctly.
I think Mannheim's Conformal Gravity does explain somethings of MOND very well, but I don't say that I understand it. It also fails miserably at Gravitational Lensing. But this is the only theory that does explain MOND.
The TeVaS is just an extension of MOND and I would n't put too much money in it. It doesn't explain MOND, and only merges MOND with Relativity. That is not good enough.
FWIW, I was trying for Funny. I can understand calling it Flamebait, but Overrated? That's just cowardly and wrong.
The antimatter deposits reside in naturally-occurring magnetic pressor-beam bottles, which keep the matter out, and the antimatter in.
(A pressor beam is the opposite of a tractor beam, in that it "presses" matter (and antimatter) away, rather than "tractoring" it in.)
The mutual annihilation caused by the stray atom of matter or antimatter that occasionally crosses the boundary creates enough energy to make the bottles self-sustaining.
The aliens (who are made of conventional matter) mine the antimatter by distorting the shape of the bottles (using energy) so that they "fracture" into smaller-sized bottles, which are more easily handled (or, occasionally, antimatter fields are found that already have bottles of the appropriate size).
The bottles make the antimatter relatively easy to transport, so the antimatter is left in the bottles until it is needed.
Yeah, that's it.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
so you're saying at the "beginning of universe", when matter and antimatter were both very common in this galaxy, instead of all antimatter starting a reaction with matter, some unknown energy kept antimatter in deposits, and apparently that unknown energy even had some intelligence to it, while sometimes letting a few atoms into the antimatter, and the energy sustains itself using 2 or 4 atoms worth of gamma rays (1 atom + 1 antimatter atom usually creates about 512 electron volts of gamma rays), and the aliens can easily change the direction of this energy... hmmmmm.
:D (of course you don't, but let's assume...)
you expect me to believe that?
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
Not so much "intelligence" as a kind of natural equilibrium, with quantum mechanics allowing the occasional tunneling.
As to the credibility of this explanation, I'm going to say that it's probably sufficient for Star Trek, and leave it at that.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
it's more than safe to say startrek is helplessly unrealistic. :)
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
Whereas claiming that 1 zarbo = 326 666 666 666 666 666 dollars is the very epitome of reality.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Whereas claiming that 1 zarbo = 326 666 666 666 666 666 dollars is the very epitome of reality.
and so is claiming that it isn't.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS