8 Feb
2014
8 Feb
'14
8:33 p.m.
It never ceases to amaze me when NASA says they
can't do something anymore that they used to be able to do.
In this case (and probably others), it has to do with limited
resources - which current experiment do you temporarily shut down to
make room for restarting an old one (and how do you deal with all the
screaming and politics that will certainly follow).
There are horror stories of large stacks of magnetic
tape that had to be rescued from NASA because they didn't know what to do with them
and did not care -- but non-government people could and did. The same sort of thing is at
work here. How hard would this be, if the agency were competent? Not very.
The mythical tapes. Yes, NASA has been a bit clueless about many of
these tapes - but they *can* be clueless about them. The data was
pulled off years ago and is quite safe and available (for example, go
ask the NASA Planetary Data Systems people). Often, the people that
complain about "lost data" on these tapes are actually looking for
data that the original experiment never intended to deal with, or in
some extreme cases, they want data that could be pulled off the
telemetry tapes. Yeah, those tapes are long gone.
--
Will