NASA Pioneer 10 & 11 data archiving: only by luck

[Glen Newton]

Spend a mountain of $$$ to send space probes where we've never been
and then throw away the data? Luckily one person decided to archive
the data...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/finding-the-source-of-the-pioneer-anomaly/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=120612

"As luck would have it, most of the Pioneer 10 and 11 telemetry data
had been saved and were available for study. Although there was no
requirement that NASA properly archive these records, it turned out
that systems engineer Larry Kellogg, a contractor and former Pioneer
team member at NASA Ames Research Center, had been informally
preserving all the Pioneer data he could get his hands on. Kellogg
already had nearly all of the two probes’ master data records, binary
data files that contained all the Pioneers’ science and housekeeping
data.

Kellogg had taken care to copy those records, which in total took up
just 40 gigabytes of space, from soon-to-be obsolete magneto-optical
discs to a laptop hard drive. When we decided to work with the
telemetry data in earnest, in 2005, one of us (Toth) had already been
in touch with Kellogg, working on new software that could extract
useful information from the master data records without the need for
an old, decommissioned mainframe."

Note that the "_just_ 40GB" is valid today: I am sure Kellogg had to
work hard over the last 40 years to store the accumulating data. For
example, 15 years ago to store the then probably 25GB of data: in 1998
hard disks were at about 5-10GB capacity and ~$400 each.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png
- http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm

Also: "About the Authors: Viktor T. Toth is a software engineer in
Ottawa, Ont., Canada"

-Glen

--
-
http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/
-

[Gerry Tychon]

I have found this situation several times. Sometimes the last remaining copy of the data has been deleted from a computer. Other times data has been rescued because someone had it in their barn or garage. In times past there often was poor data management practices -- data roles and responsibilities not clearly defined. The situation today may be better but I still find organizations with no proper data management strategy.

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 4:32 AM, Glen Newton <[hidden email]> wrote:

Spend a mountain of $$$ to send space probes where we've never been
and then throw away the data? Luckily one person decided to archive
the data...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/finding-the-source-of-the-pioneer-anomaly/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=120612

"As luck would have it, most of the Pioneer 10 and 11 telemetry data
had been saved and were available for study. Although there was no
requirement that NASA properly archive these records, it turned out
that systems engineer Larry Kellogg, a contractor and former Pioneer
team member at NASA Ames Research Center, had been informally
preserving all the Pioneer data he could get his hands on. Kellogg
already had nearly all of the two probes’ master data records, binary
data files that contained all the Pioneers’ science and housekeeping
data.

Kellogg had taken care to copy those records, which in total took up
just 40 gigabytes of space, from soon-to-be obsolete magneto-optical
discs to a laptop hard drive. When we decided to work with the
telemetry data in earnest, in 2005, one of us (Toth) had already been
in touch with Kellogg, working on new software that could extract
useful information from the master data records without the need for
an old, decommissioned mainframe."

Note that the "_just_ 40GB" is valid today: I am sure Kellogg had to
work hard over the last 40 years to store the accumulating data. For
example, 15 years ago to store the then probably 25GB of data: in 1998
hard disks were at about 5-10GB capacity and ~$400 each.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png
- http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm

Also: "About the Authors: Viktor T. Toth is a software engineer in
Ottawa, Ont., Canada"

-Glen

--
-
http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/
-
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