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Volunteers Recover Lunar Orbiter 1 Photographs
mikael writes "The LA Times is reporting on the efforts of a group of volunteers with funding from NASA to recover high resolution photographs of the Moon taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 in the 1960s. The collection of 2000 images is stored entirely on magnetic tape which can only be read by a $330,000 FR-900 Ampex magnetic tape reader. The team consisted of Nancy Evans, NASA's archivist who ensured that the 20-foot by 10-foot x 6-foot collection of magnetic tapes were never thrown out, Dennis Wingo, Keith Cowing of NASA Watch and Ken Zim who had experience of repairing video equipment. Two weeks ago, the second image, of the Copernicus Crater, was recovered."
$250,000 and 20-some years to rebuild the tape drives to get the images back with twice the dynamic range and none of the grain of the 35mm snaps that were taken of these images originally and what do we get?
a 35K jpeg.
hopefully NASA intends to release something a little more high-res.
When they're finished, why don't they make a torrent of the data and post it to TPB?
This data is supposed to be in the public domain, so there should be no reason not to do it, and P2P might turn out to be a good failsafe, in case this happens again with whatever medium they use this time.
Piracy saved lots of BBC content once, why not try to do it for NASA?
GPG 0x1B479C78
All of the data I've created on a computer in the past 20 years is readable by modern machines -- it's on 3.5" floppy. Stored properly, and read on a clean drive (NOT the one which has been sucking up dust for the past six years, otherwise unused), this stuff still works fine.
I've thrown almost all of of it away, though. That's the part you missed in your synopsis of media history: The human aspect.
Some of the stuff that I've tossed, I'd like to get back, but it's in a landfill somewhere.
Some of the sheepskin documents survive; but the unimportant ones (as determined by the people of the day) are mostly gone, having been discarded.
Kid-proof tablet..
Why do you say "most of it is available now"? Do you have any idea how much written information has been lost over the last 5000 years or so of written history?
We have countless examples of information where we've lost a large part. Take the Epic Cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle . It would appear to be an extremely important work from the Classical period, and the only surviving examples are considered literary milestones. Yet only some 25% of the data has survived to this point.
75% loss over a few measly millennia is pretty lossy performance.