Drive From Sydney Museum Could Unlock NASA Moon Data

"An archiving error by NASA has meant 173 data tapes have sat in Perth for almost 40 years, holding information about lunar dust that could be vital in expanding science's understanding of the moon. But after almost four decades, a donation from a Sydney computer society looks set to breathe fresh life into a long-neglected field of lunar science. ... These were the only active measurements of moon dust made during the Apollo missions, and no-one thought it was important. ... Mr Holmes has kept the tapes in a climate-controlled room since then, and it was only when he stumbled upon a 1960s IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive at the Australian Computer Museum that his company had the ability to unlock the information."

Open source hardware

Perhaps why every hardware produced should have its complete spec available. I know Librarians really want this, but no one listens to them sadly..

Instead we DRM things.. :-/

Open source data

"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"
-- Linus Torvalds

I would surely be happy to spare a few dozen gigs to store old NASA data. Just keep a md5 registry of them to be sure no one modified them and roll them on the net !

A P2P network like Kazaa or Gnutella could have become the greatest human knowledge repository and backup system known to mankind but instead it became this outlaw thing. A real missed occasion there.

Re:Open source data

I would surely be happy to spare a few dozen gigs to store old NASA data. Just keep a md5 registry of them to be sure no one modified them and roll them on the net !

More like ~ 3 gigs.

4800 bits an inch * 28800 inches (best case) * 147 tapes == 20,321,280,000 bits / 6 bit work == 3386880000 6bitbytes / 1024 == 3,307,500KB / 1024 == 3230MB assuming you lazily dump each 6 bit byte into a the "modern" (ignoring Unicode) 8 bit format.

or if you were worried about capacity on your own system, store in binary and count a "byte" as being 8 bits like all the other young yahooligans. 20,321,280,000 bits == ~2.4GB.

This is ignoring very very likely error correcting overhead that (hopefully) was encoded into the data on the tape, and the certainly embedded error checking overhead which you don't really need to worry about with modern storage systems for a dataset this small; so the actual amount of data to store is probably smaller still.

Still quite impressive when you consider an Apple II floppy drive formatted to 13 sectors per track in the early 80's was still on ~160KB (although size and cost sure were a lot better!) :)

Now git the hell off my lawn before I have to pull out my model M...

I knew it!

See, this is exactly the kind of article I need as an argument for keeping all those 286-era and 386-era PC parts that the wife's been complaining about!

Re:I knew it!

"...but darling, they're gathering dust for a reason..."

Re:I knew it!

I don't think she'll be convinced that the dust they're collecting is moon dust...

It's The Making Of documentary!

To be found on the extras disc of Apollo XI 40th Anniversary Special Collectors' Edition DVD, out next year!

Not as clean as it should be...

About the tape drive: " It's certainly not simple, there's a lot of circuitry in there, it's old, it's not as clean as it should be [...]."

Well, of course not, it has been gathering dust since the 1970's... :)

Suspension of disbelief.

This sounds like something from a really bad sci-fi story. --The sort of thing which couldn't possibly happen in reality because it's just so. . . stupid. --After spending enormous time and energy to go to the Moon for the FIRST TIME IN PERHAPS FOREVER, the data is brought back and then lost because somebody got lazy and didn't bother transcribing it.

But there it is. It happened.

--Which is more evidence to bolster my now firm belief that the entire world and everybody in it are actually set-dressings for a comic book.

I wonder if I've ever met any of the main characters. . .

-FL

Re:Suspension of disbelief.

This sounds like something from a really bad sci-fi story. --The sort of thing which couldn't possibly happen in reality because it's just so. . . stupid. --After spending enormous time and energy to go to the Moon for the FIRST TIME IN PERHAPS FOREVER, the data is brought back and then lost because somebody got lazy and didn't bother transcribing it.

But there it is. It happened.

--Which is more evidence to bolster my now firm belief that the entire world and everybody in it are actually set-dressings for a comic book.

I wonder if I've ever met any of the main characters. . .

-FL

That's not all they lost. They even lost the original video footage [smh.com.au], at least for a while.

Re:Suspension of disbelief.

The footage is still lost [honeysucklecreek.net]. The film recovered was of the scan converted video and was recorded in the ABC studios in Sydney. It was not the original telemetry tape. ABC Australia managed to get its own video feed of the telemetry signal (independent from the feed to the US), which they then scan converted themselves. Only the scan converted signal was transmitted to the US. Consequently, Parkes, Honeysuckle Creek and the ABC studio in Sydney were the only sites to view the moon landing in its full glory!

Re:Suspension of disbelief.

Well the best thing I found about working in the Retentions Department is that nobody ever wants the stuff back.

On a serious side, too many people archive/store items because they cannot determine value and don't want to spend the time assigning it. As such important stuff can fall through the cracks because no one is determining what is and what isn't

Re:Suspension of disbelief.

Remember that when the Apollo program was halted, it wasn't done neatly. I'm surprised this is the only study that fell on the floor. There must have been others.

The homeless Australian Computer Museum

The Australian Computer Museum [acms.org.au] is currently searching for a home. They have a sizeable collection of significant items, many of which are display ready, but spend a lot of their time loading their collection onto trucks to transport it between a succession of temporary, generally loaned, warehouses. Can anyone offer them a permanent display space in the Sydney region, or donate a large chunk of money to them so they can buy a home? It seems a crying shame that the history of the computers that are impacting every day of our lives stands to be lost.

Reverse Engineering?

This story seems kind of suspicious.

If the data's so valuable, why don't they ask IBM for a copy of design documents so they can build a new drive. I have a hard time believing IBM doesn't have a copy of the docs somewhere. Also seems unlikely IBM would say "Fuck you and your moon dust, you're not getting a drive."

Hell, worst case scenario, why haven't they reverse engineered the drives. <sarcasm>I know they had really advanced technology 50 years ago</sarcasm>, but it seems ironic they can send people to the moon, only to be thwarted by a tape drive.

Re:Reverse Engineering?

Except that, you don't need to rebuilt the whole bloody thing, you just need to build something compatible, something that can pick up & proccess the magnetic signals on the tape & transfer it to an I/O port. The documentation should be sufficient to figure out how it's stored, and go on from there, it't not like old tech hasn't been reÃmplemented with newer tech before you know.

Re:Reverse Engineering?

I know they had really advanced technology 50 years ago

...Like, say, a successful moon mission? Get off my AstroTurf, kid.

1969 [wikipedia.org] was only 39 years ago. So you're 11 years younger than you thought, but the bad news is you may have early onset Alzheimer's disease.

A nice project for Google...

... make a collection of working antique drives, paper tape readers etc, and get people to (voluntarily) send their otherwise unreadable media in. Perhaps put the data in the public domain... but I'm an ideas guy, not an IP lawyer.

Error?

An archiving error by NASA has meant 173 data tapes have sat in Perth for almost 40 years.

Exactly how do you send 173 tapes to Perth by accident?

What did they do, get the zip code wrong?
Forget that Australia isn't a state in the US?
Confuse Australia and Arizona?
Or maybe they meant to send them to the basement but sent them "down under" by accident?

Re:Error?

From TFA: Both NASA and the Perth based researcher had copies. NASA lost their copies. The researcher kept his.

NASA seems to be expert at losing data, given that they also lost the original video tapes of the moon landing [slashdot.org]. All that remain are the crumby downsampled versions.

Re:Error?

NASA is better at this than advertised. They are deliberately shrinking the NASA headquarters library [nasa.gov] and have been doing so for a long time. End result is that a lot of stuff has to be discarded. I don't have a clue about the other libraries in the NASA system, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a universal problem.

Not much chance...

I wish them luck. They are going to need it. I remember doing backups onto half-inch tape. The important tapes were re-written every six months or so. Without this, the magnetic signal on the tape tended to 'print through' to the adjacent bits of tape on the reel. Unbacked up tables lasted ramdom amounts of time - I had unbacked up tapes that lasted for four years, but others that got corrupted in a year or so.

A lot depends on two things. If the data was not written using the densest data format, then there might be enough signal to read. If the data is not raw, random bytes, then it is possible the odd bit error can be recovered.

There are computer forensic techniques that might be able to read these tapes. I find it hard to believe that they will read on the unmodified original drive. But, who knows until you try?

Reading Alien programs

What amazes me is that while we cannot seem to be able to read a 30-40 year old magnetic tape without original technology, we believe we can understand a potential communication from another race of beings.

Given the capability of modern computers, why cannot the tapes be read as raw data onto disc, then "decrypted" for the information. It is not like we need a Rosetta Stone for this, we know the language and the data was most likely not encrypted. I am surprised this would be considered difficult. Script kiddies can crack DRM method in short order, this is more of the same.

Now as to figuring out alien communication signals...the aliens would have to be rolling on the deck if they heard we cannot figure out how to read our own technology.

"Hey blork, send them another signal...what? they can't understand their own stuff? Fuggitabout, let's go home"

These are likely ANALOG tapes

I just happen to be in the telemetry business. One thing I think maybe people here don't know is that it's lkey these tapes are analog, not digital. OK, yes the signal might even be digital but if yo look at a digital signal it's just a voltage that varies over time. Much of the time, even today we record the analog signal as it comes in then while the tape is running wepull out the bits and process with a computer and the digital data ends up in a big disk array.

Why analog. The most "interresting" data is always after a failure. The rocket is in peices and spinning the antenna points at you them away and it's very much a big mess until the signal ends. Analog tape catches all this. Even if the data is giberish you can figur out the rate of rotation of the debries and some velocities from the doppler shift. And some time they are able to get small segments of digtal data from the tapes.

Back in 1969 the data could have been analog. Maybe "FM" where the frequency of a tone carries the signal. Way back then it was commpon to drive pen plotters with telemetry and the data archive would be paper, but with an analog tape backup.

Typical tapes might be 1 inch wide and move at 30 inches per second. They'd be "wideband" and able to record amalog up to a few Mhz. Kind of like very high quality video tape. From memory I think the reels were about 18 to 20 inches in diameter. It's NOT "computer tape". Think instead of a reel to reel recorder used musicians in recording studios but only with a 10X bigger budget.

That said I have used 60's era digital computer tapes. Typical specs were 6250 bytes per inch with 300 inch per second read/write speeds. When yo looked at the reels you could not see them move, just a blur. The motors inside the drives were huge and very powerfull. So we'd see data rates of 300x6250 about 1.8 megabytes per second. The computer I used had ten of these tape drives connected to it. But this is NOT the kind of tape used for telemetry.

Re:Any cheap TK50 conversion services?

I decided it wasn't worth the $500 I was quoted a few years ago

Come on dude, try harder. There are probably dozens if not hundreds of DEC hobbyists whom would be glad to make a trade with you. How about you get your priceless data copied to multiple CDs and DVDs (or floppies?) in both .tap format (essentially an ".iso" for tapes for use with emulators) and perhaps copy the individual files into an iso9660 cdrom, and they keep the physical tapes, I'm sure they'd find more of a use for the physical tapes than you will... Or you keep the physical tapes and pay for their labor with beer and/or food and/or copies of the software possibly on the tapes and/or some other kind of gratuity. You pay the postage, which is going to be cheap, unless it really is priceless data in which case you'll use registered insured individually-tracked airmail or bonded courier service or armed guards in an armored car or something.

I would guess that within a couple hours of posting to cctech you'll get some sort of offer. Now if you get all unreasonable and essentially want them to pay you for the privilege of helping you, it isn't going to happen, but offer a fair trade and it'll work out. Maybe ask them what they want for the service. It'll be an afternoon's work so an afternoon's gratuity would be appropriate. If done in person maybe everyone goes to the bar/restaurant afterwards, and you pay, that sounds about fair to me.

I'd help, but I don't have a TK50 or any tape drive for that matter. Its not good enough to ask who has a VAX you need a VAX with a VMS install with a TK50 tape drive. It would probably help to provide any specs you have on the original system if you remember them.

Heres the classiccmp cctech mailing list web interface:

http://www.classiccmp.org/cctech.html [classiccmp.org]

Some tapes can easily be read after 40 years, some the oxide turns to dust after a couple years. Proper storage helps but is not absolute prevention. Don't be pissed off at the guy whom tries to help you, if your tape is one of those that turns to dust.

Proper tape storage is vaguely "library-like". It is possible to be more specific than that, but why bother since most tapes outside of corporate data centers seem to be stored in damp basements, hot attics, on top of radiators, so bad that almost anything would be an improvement.

The only thing that is certain, is the longer you wait the less likely the tape will be in good enough condition to read.

A bit of google searching usenet archives would give you some leads too.