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Space

NASA To Contact Its Oldest Spacecraft 111

Posted by timothy from the don't-build-'em-like-they-used-ta dept.
BugBBQ writes: "This is very "Space:1999 UltraProbe" kinda-kool... NASA will attempt to contact its oldest spacecraft, Pioneer-6, launched in 1965! (yikes! that's the year I was born for crying out loud! which I'm sure I did at the time)). p.s.: Anyone who gets the Space:1999 ref is welcome to e-mail me" This bird has been spinning through space for a long time.
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NASA To Contact Its Oldest Spacecraft More

NASA To Contact Its Oldest Spacecraft

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  • Well it's simply because the Nuclear Waste Dumps on the far side failed to explode :)

    Troc
  • Cool. Pioneer's a Stones fan.
  • Seven billion light years? uh, that means that even travelling at the speed of light, it was launched seven billion years ago.
    NowI understand why it's NASA's oldest spacecraft...

  • Too bad it doesn't run Linux (Score:3)

    by i_hate_windows ( 6811 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @03:28AM (#592431)
    Could you imagine the uptime!!

    uptime 12764 days, 04:25, 1 user
  • Is that your head cold or mine?
  • Or maybe using it for target practice - ala Klingons in Star Trek.
  • Seeing how far out it is, what kind of data is it collecting?

    Dark.....more dark....cold....ooh, colder...some different dark...

  • There was the return of a probe which used a dangerous drive engine. I think they called it the Quella or Qwella drive. They ended up turning it around to point at some enemy to destroy them. Even included wavy camera effects.
  • 7billion miles is just under 1/2 a light-day (10.4 light hours).

    This data brought to you courtsey of the program 'units(1)', and the OS 'Linux'.
    `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

  • I think this quote is in reference to Buck Rogers.

    1999 was the year he was shot in to space and lost/frozen, only to be found/thawed in the 21st century.

    -
  • I suspect there are numerous PDP-11's and VAXes out there, still running after 20+ years.
  • I think the relevent fact is that if it were 7 billion light years away, we would have had to have launched the pioner 7 billion years ago, at the speed of light.

    Then again, perhaps the dinosaurs were more advanced than we thought...

  • One of the later probes had the first Intel processor on board and that's still working :) ...Then NASA decided to use Microsoft software for the last two Mars probes and the rest is history!
  • guess its not a Buck Rogers reference after all...
    oh well.
    -
  • I can't happen until Martin Landau is on the moon....

    Rick

  • Come back and ask the DOJ and M$ in 34 years, and they'll be able to tell you all about going around in circles...

  • Re:Far Out (Score:3)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @07:09AM (#592444) Homepage Journal
    You're mixing up two different probes...

    Pioneer 6 is in solar orbit at 0.74 AU

    Pioneer 10 has left the solar system, and is 7 billion miles away

  • You need to square each term....
    (dS)^2 = (dx)^2 - (dt)^2
    where we measure time in length units (set c=1, the way real physicists do it :-). We could have chosen time units overall, and measured physical lengths in time units, but I chose not to, since it usually isn't done that way. The quantity dS is the spacetime interval between the two events, dx is the physical distance between the two events as measured in a particular inertial reference frame, and dt is the time elapsed between the two events as measured in the same frame. The important thing is that dS is a frame independent (Lorentz invariant) quantity, so all observers will agree on the measurement of dS^2, although not necessarily dx or dt.

    When ds^2 > 0, the two events are spacelike separated, meaning that the two events could not have affected each other (they are not causally connected, in the lingo), as they are farther apart in space than the distance light signals could propogate given the measured time difference.

    When dS^2 timelike separated, meaning the two events could have affected each other (light could have propagated from one to the other in the time measured, with time left over, meaning (potentially) other types of particles could have travelled from one to the other).

    Finally, when dS^2=0, the two events are null separated, or light-like separated, since the two events could only have affected each other by light signals.

    Using measurements of intervals from many different events, we can (approximately) reconstruct the metric.

  • Humph. I don't normally whine about moderation, but, but I think Farsighed and I were on the same wavelength here -- Their Satanic Majeties Request, Track 9, "2000 Light Years From Home".

    It's not terribly germane, but at least I was no more OT than the parent to which I was replying.

  • So are you going to create Pioneer6@Home, so amateurs with satellite antennas can try to contact Pioneer 6 and extract the signal from the noise?
  • It may depend upon how safe it is for others to listen to the probe. The article makes it sound as if the probe requires a command to send data -- perhaps the probe is not designed to continuously transmit, so the command code should not be made widely available.

    If the probe is continuously transmitting, then it would be nice if they'd just publish orbital elements and protocol information so everyone with a 300-meter antenna can listen in.

  • Thanks for the clue. I really should read up on my space probes... :)

    Rick

  • NASA just turned off the funding spigot for the Extreme Ultra-Violet Explorer [euvexplorer.com], because they couldn't find $1M to keep it running for another year. No other stellar observatory can image in this band.
  • The moderator. And I thought your post was funny as hell, BTW.

    Maybe there should be a moderation history, like there is a posting history for each user. You can have anonymous moderation, but people can choose to ignore the anonymous moderations if they want.
  • Not a bad idea for the moderation, and thanks for the support.
  • What the fsck are you talking about?! Who the hell said anything about "gay"? Put that back in your pants before you hurt yourself you fscking freak. "Moron".

    --

  • As for hardware and protocols, I guess it could be interesting as a amateur science project, and NASA are usually quite open about such things. The link posted by lemox, has the e-mail address of the project manager at the bottom of it [nasa.gov]. Why don't you contact him and ask about the feasibility of building something to downlink data and analyze them. You know, I think most old scientists would provide that inforamtion very cheerfully.

    My additional question is what practical use it's information would have today, with all the monitoring equipment we have on Earth and have sent into orbit.

    Very little, I'm afraid. There are many more very good instruments, most notably SOHO [nasa.gov], TRACE [lmsal.com].

    However, for a amateur science project, it would be great, as you're working on data from a spacecraft that made history, and you're the only one who does it.

    The question remains, how expensive it would be to build an antenna to downlink the signals.

  • To quote the space.com article you link to:
    "Now, nearly 7 billion miles from Earth"

    Exchange "light years" for "miles" and you're all set :).

    Still very cool though.
  • I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
  • Wasn't that V'ger? I mean Voyager?

  • That was voyager, fool, NOT pioneer

  • However if it was travekling at near light speed, from its perspective its only been going a few months/weeks/days/nanoseconds. If it trned arround can came back and said "when I left it was 6 months ago - who was president", we would say Clinton. The probe would disagree, saying it was a trick question as Earth did not exist 7 billion years ago.

  • It's .74 AUs from the Sun, that's only about 20 million miles from Earth.

    Pioneer 10 and 11 are the ones that are waaay out there.

  • An additional small piece of info (Score:3)

    by bbay ( 192854 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @04:04AM (#592461)
    The article doesn't mention this, so in case anyone was wondering. The last time this spacecraft was contacted was in October of 1997.

  • Re:Cool, BUT.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Not true, voyager surpassed Pioneer 10 in 1998 and still sends data by the way...
  • I think what we have to worry about is the early Borg finding it and giving it sentience.

    -J
  • The space-time metric is not unknown to us primitive earthlings. I ran into it in my second year course on relativity. It is called delta s. (I can't make that damn triangle).

    My signs may be wrong, but
    delta S = delta x - (c * delta t)
    Unfortunately, I also forget what it was called. I do remember that whether it was positive or negative had some significance, though. If it was positive, there was an inertial frame of reference in which the two events that the delta was measured between were simultaneous. If it was negative, there was an inertial frame of reference in which the two events occur at the same point in space.

    Also, check out the units - distance.

  • Re:ping... (Score:3)

    by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @04:17AM (#592465)
    /*

    * [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum
    * possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP
    * to talk to the University of Mars. * PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented
    * ftp to mars will work nicely.
    */


    - from /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [round trip time]

  • Re:7 billion light years (Score:4)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @04:28AM (#592466)
    Yes, but we know that time travel can be achieved by attaining the exact speed of 88 mph (plus a flux capacitor)...so maybe we launched it yesterday, it went back 7 billion years in time, and now we are just trying to contact it.
  • For all your Space: 1999 needs!

    SPACE: 1999 CYBRARY [cybrary1999.com]

    Capt. Ron

  • I've wrapped tinfoil around my head to keep the PsiCops out.
  • By using probes (like Voyager) to gather useful information about our universe, even after a few decades, helps NASA justify the high cost of construction and dedication of manhours.

    If you are a space nut (like myself) and have a particular interest in the Voyager Intersellar mission you should check out their homepage at:
    http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/voyager.html [nasa.gov]

    The site has info about the manhours involved, about the 40 year mission and how the cost of such missions (if designed for long term service) can be quite affordable.

    Capt. Ron

  • Re:What hardware is it running? (Score:3)

    by Prof_Dagoski ( 142697 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @08:30AM (#592470) Homepage

    NASA is open about such things, but based on my experience with the UARS satellite, much of the protocols were one shot solutions applicable only to the particular mission or mission family. If the thing's still up and running you've got a good shot of getting everything on the web. However, if it's been shut down for more than a couple of years, they probably tossed the binders containing the documentation. That was a big problem even on a working project like HRDI and UARS were during the early 90s. Namely it had been running for a several years already, the software was getting long in the tooth and it needed updating. A lot of my job was tweaking legacy code to to bring it in line with language updates and whatnot. Its really frustrating to be able to find no documentation whatsoever on a critical piece of running code. And, thats from the programmer's point of view. I don't wanna think about ther operations engineers would have done if they had to restart it. Anyway, searching for lost documentation would be an original science history project. It'd also be fun to go through the old software archives and take a peek at the code. Mind you for something this old who knows how its stored--punch cards? It kinda gives the creeps to know that someday a historian may draw an image of me based solely on a bunch kludgy Fortran 66 and VAX DCL programs.

  • <I>Of course, Mir has outlasted my last 3 VCR's, my car, my education, and a few other things!</I>

    Under constant repair. When was the last time you opened up one of your VCRs and replaced any of its dohickies? ;-)
  • Some geek you are... :)

    The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196

  • Mondbase Alpha (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why didn't the moon spin off into Space in 1999? I was really disappointed by that...

  • NASA (Score:3)

    by twodogs ( 187983 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @08:40AM (#592474)
    What are they going to say? "Ground Control To Major Tom"

  • P'ner (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't they will be able to contact it. P'ner will come back and try to contact us though. Perhaps encased in a big cloud...
  • I always wondered why they named a Star Trek spinoff series after the villian from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

  • Re:Disturbing... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, I kwon what you mean. NASA could at have phoned to see how it's doing, but it didn't. That's parents for you.
  • not to mention 1.21 gigawatts...
  • Hehee .. if that thing's still working. Good ole' discrete electronics don't fail as much as Intel's processors! :)

    --
  • Its hard to keep interest and funding up for these old guys, but it is well worth the effort.

    I can imagine the costs of these old guys are a bitch. "Jones, Voyager 2 needs its motherboard replaced. Make sure to bill your travel time"
  • They should save their money, because it won't be long before p'ner comes looking for the maker.

    I just hope we have a good supply of bald Arab birds to hand.
  • "The TRW Inc.-built spacecraft was the first - and is now the lone survivor - of a series of four identical spacecraft launched between 1965 and 1968."

    There are a few TRW research sites near where I live, one of them is up on a hill where they test antennae and other such stuff, they have this upside down airplane up on stilts which they use for their testing. The site is relativly popular amongst the local population, it's commonly refered to as "the upside down airplane". Of course it also has the advantage of being right next to a beautiful overlook of the San Jose suburbia, so it's popular for another reason too ;)

  • Does it disturb anyone that NASA didn't keep in contact with this probe,
    even if only for the sheer PR value of having a 'human presence' so far
    away from our home planet?

    This doesn't bode well for generation-based or worse yet, sleeper missions
    to remote places, does it :)

  • How the hell is the above comment flamebait? What kind of fuckwitted retard could even think that a harmless Star Trek joke could be flamebait?

  • I don't really...A lot of radio telescopes could be put to 'better' use by performing other duties. Using a lot of manpower and resources to keep contact with a single probe would seem wasteful to me.

    Of course, I don't have any numbers...

  • What hardware is it running? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30, 2000 @12:36AM (#592486)
    As any geek would be, I would be interested to know what kind of hardware was used to build that thing, especially considering when it was built. I also wonder what the protocol is used to download data from the spacecraft, doubt anyone would know, except NASA people, considering it would be proprietary.

    "...originally launched on what was to have been a fleeting six-month mission to measure the solar wind, solar magnetic field and cosmic rays."

    My additional question is what practical use it's information would have today, with all the monitoring equipment we have on Earth and have sent into orbit. Keep in mind it does have the advantage of not being obstructed by Earth's weather nor any other Earthly obstructions because it's in a solar oribt.

  • ping... (Score:4)

    by glgraca ( 105308 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @12:36AM (#592487)
    ping -i 36667
  • not as cool as Pioneer 10. It is now 7 billion light years away, and the remote-est man-made object(!) http://www.space.com/news/pioneer_update.html [space.com] and it's still active!
    --
  • 65 to 2001, that's....uuuhh...well 36 I guess! That's not that long compared to the age of everything else around it.
  • I know!!!!

    And so did just about everyone else who read the comment. It's just that everyone else (apart from the AC who said the same thing) probably knew that I knew.

  • Re:Disturbing... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's only three years since they last checked in on it. At that time two of the instruments were still working and collecting data.

  • Usefull Data. (Score:5)

    by HiyaPower ( 131263 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @02:57AM (#592492)
    Some of these older space probes are still producing useful data. Check out Mit's Space Plasma [mit.edu] web page. Voyager 2 is alive and well and producing data which is being actively studied. It should be passing the heliopause soon and then really be out beyond the system. Its hard to keep interest and funding up for these old guys, but it is well worth the effort.
  • True, but it would have had to be travelling at least 7 billion years to be that far away, unless NASA developed FTL travel without telling anyone....
  • light year is not a time unit!
    Yeah... and a parsec isn't a measurement of time, either. But that didn't stop ol' George... (Lucas)
  • I wouls imagine BugBBQ is named after the character named Bug Barbeque in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs. I always thought that was a lame-ass nick name for the character though...
  • Pioneers 10 and 11 are the ones on the way out of the solar system. Pioneer 6 was one of the first to leave the Earth-Moon system and go into an inependent orbit around the sun. It bounces around in a circle between Venus and Mars.
  • Actually, the Space.com story refers to it being 7 billion miles away, not light-years. Just to put it in perspective, our Galaxy is ~100,000 light-years across (depending on who you talk to).
  • Washington D.C. - The fatted calf was killed today as NASA officials welcomed its prodigal son, Pioneer-6, back into the fold.

    "You know how it is," said Dr. Phil McCrevice, 67 year old mission speacialist who was the youngest member of the Pioneer-6 launch team in 1965. "People get busy, move away, grow apart. It's not to say that we didn't think of Pioneer-6 all these years, but...." The crusty old scientist then began weeping softly.

    NASA has begun to plan a family reunion for all the much beloved but long neglected space hardware it has cast out over the years. "Heck, we haven't even tried to get in touch with any of the stuff we left on the moon in the Apollo years," a ranking NASA official said, "I wonder how they've been?"
  • Why should this cost "quite a lot of $$$"? They're going to ring it up and see if it answers. What's the cost of that? It isn't like they're sending a manned mission to take some publicity shots of the thing. There hasn't been any maintenance done to it.

    Besides, if they're still getting data from this thing, isn't there any value in that?
  • I have to buy a new VCR every 2 years. Pioneer 6 has been continuously functioning for 35 years now. Of course, my VCR only cost $100; I'm sure Pioneer 6 probably cost around $100,000,000.99. I guess you do pay for quality.

    Of course, Mir has outlasted my last 3 VCR's, my car, my education, and a few other things!
  • Well, it was so hopelessly not funny, that we thought perhaps you didn't know...

    --
  • I may just be feaning my yout here, but that bird is 14 years older than I am! And to think that I was actually starting to think I was getting old. Man. It's hard to believe that they (NASA) could pull of something that advanced back then. Wow.

    --

  • used to calibrate SETI (Score:3)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @04:44AM (#592503)
    The other pioneers 10 & 11 faint signals are used
    to test SETI equipment. I recall one of the two
    becoming undetectable recently.

  • >One of the later probes had the first Intel processor on board and that's still working :)

    That was before their partnership with Rambus, Intel was made mediocre by association!!

  • ...because if nothing else it gives ground controlers training and practice at contacting robotic craft. What other thing can you use to practice new tracking and communication techinuqes on? Unless you are willing to have NASA mess with craft like Voyager 2 then this is the best way to train new personal and tune their communication techinque.
  • The Kessel Run involves flying damn close to a black hole, according to the novels. It takes big balls to make a "short" run (i.e. a straighter line)
    Han Solo is bragging that he's crazy enough to take an extremely short path, close to the black hole.
  • fyi

    Space 1999 - V. 1 - Voyager's Return

    Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
    Cast: Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Jeremy Kemp, Barry Stokes

    Running Time: 1 hr
    Distributor: J2 Communications
    Summary:
    Moonbase Alpha suddenly encounters Voyager One, launched from Earth years earlier to collect data on the universe. But its drive system is malfunctioning and is destroying all matter.
  • It's purpose was to study the solar wind. Moving away from the sun is kinda counterproductive to that end...

    Eric

  • I do a twice weekly ``finger nasanews@space.mit.edu 2>&1 | /usr/bin/mailx -s "NASA Space News" spacefans'' to keep up to date on what NASA's doing and this item didn't appear. Guess I'll have to find another source so I can get news about space the microsecond it happens.

    A terse comment in response to another post about why NASA hasn't been listening to Pioneer 6 all the time: ``$$$''

    Have a good one!

    --

  • PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented ftp to mars will work nicely.

    Using TCP for any small-packet transmissions on a high-latency connection is ludicrous. TCP (as opposed to the simpler UDP) guarantees delivery in packet's original order, or the socket dies. It does this by sending back receipts to each routing step. You can "assume success" for a while, but if you do, why not use UDP without all that receipt time?

    "Server, you there?" [up to 40 minutes ping time to Mars]
    "Yeah. What do you want?"
    "Log me in with these credentials: XXX" [another 40 minutes ping time]
    "Roger."
    "Here's bytes 0 to 511: XXXX"... and so on.

  • 7 billion lightyears? Check yourself, there - 7 billion lightyears is a long, long way away from where Pioneer 10 is sitting.
    Try 7 billion miles, as is stated in the first paragraph of your link.

    7 billion lightyears = approx 4.115 e 22 miles.

    At least it wasn't an English-metric error.

  • The should finish the series with V'ger meeting the crew of the Voyager.

    <'ancient' telemetry>"Hi there I've been collecting data for quite some time, mind if I digitize you?"</'ancient' telemetry> Zzap! Show [thankfully] over...

    Capt. Ron

  • What the hell was I thinking. Miles, not light years... my bad.


    --

  • Re:Intel - eat your heart out! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One of the later probes had the first Intel processor on board and that's still working :)
  • Did you all notice the picture of the plaque that was included on Pioneer 10?
    Click here [space.com] if you missed it.
    Very Euro-centric drawings of humans don't you think? The guy looks like an insurance salesman from Iowa.
    I just hope the aliens don't land in China or Africa and think they must have made a wrong turn two light-years back. ;-)
  • From the artical it sounds like it's just sitting off our doorstep. It's orbitting the sun at a distance of 0.8AU (1 AU = distance between the earth and the sun).

    Nothing ike going round in circles for 35 years :-)

  • 7 billion light years (Score:4)

    by rjh ( 40933 ) <rjh@sixdemonbag.org> on Thursday November 30, 2000 @12:46AM (#592518)
    If it's seven billion light years away, then that might explain why my pings to it always timeout. :)

    (I think you meant seven billion here, not seven billion light years. One LY = 6 trillion miles/9 trillion KM, if I recall correctly. I really, really doubt that Pioneer 10 is 63 billion trillion KM away.)

  • wow (Score:1)

    by neorf ( 223036 )
    when it was launched, space was all nothing but fields

    i bet it will have some stories to tell.


    ---

  • Who wouldn't get the Space 1999 [space1999.net] reference?

    BTW, Martin Landau [eonline.com] rules... (He was the captain/leader on Space 1999) even if he hasn't aged very well...

  • I find this REALLY annoying (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... because despite the "way cool" aspect of this, they'll be spending quite a lot of $$$ that could've gone into other programs. Speaking as someone who has had $100k NASA grants turned down for "lack of funds", I wonder how many people like me might've been able to keep their jobs if just a few of these unneeded frivolities weren't sucking away diminishing dollars.

    I know that sounds like sour grapes, but I can't even encourage students to go into research anymore - the chances of making a livelihood are so small nowadays, the percentage of time one spends looking for their next meal, and the everyday stress of wondering if money will be yanked out from under you just no longer measures up to all of the positive aspects of the career. I've been watching this over the last 20 years; I don't see any likelihood of any change for the better in the next 4 (8?) years.

  • compared to todays stuff, those things almost are discrete components. A 4004(wild guess) would have transistors the size of your fist. Not very vulnerable to sunspots* :) (or, more accuratly, cosmic rays).

    * an ex-boss used to jokingly blame all software troubles (esp heisenbugs) on sunspots.

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • Ummm... if that were the case it would have to orbiting the Sun inside Earth's orbit.

    The value 74 AU's, OTOH, corresponds roughly to the 7 billion miles (not light years, people) number that's been quoted elsewhere.

    Why would it only be a few 10's of millions of miles away after 35 years, when Galileo reached Jupiter (c. 500 million miles from the Sun) in just a couple of years?

  • This vehicle, in particular, was launched 35 years ago. It has the computing power equivilant of a c64 (If I gauge that correctly.), and NASA wants to contact it now? Was it not good enough in 1990? *sniff* *sniff* do I smell publicity stunt? Now, not to flame NASA in general, but contacting a ship that has been pretty much written off as a 'Rock' hurdling through space, I just do not get what NASA hopes to gain. 'Yea! It's still talking! Ok, shut down the equipment, we will meet back here in another 20 years.' It's like trying to contact an ex-girlfriend. You might get ahold of her, but chances are, it's not going to be a meaningful conversation.

  • Re:What hardware is it running? (Score:5)

    by lemox ( 126382 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @01:00AM (#592532)

    There's not a whole lot of info on Pioneer 6, but what is you can find is here [nasa.gov] and here [nasa.gov].

    Pioneer 10 is the sexier of ventures, since it's now the furthest away, and therefore gets more attention.

  • Ah, but . . . (Score:3)

    by Selanit ( 192811 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @01:02AM (#592534)

    . . . . what NASA doesn't realize is that the aliens have now intercepted the probe and are using it as a coffee table. Any data returned are the result of spilled coffee, or alien equivalent thereof. :-)

  • "What do they hope to gain?" you ask.....
    A lot!
    It may seem like an insignificant thing to do, reestablish contact with a 35-year-old probe that is millions of miles away. You have to look at the big picture in the future when people are living and traveling away from this planet the research may prove (will definitely prove) to be invaluable.
    Also I wonder what the ping time would be for the pioneer 10?

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