Help Solve the Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly 473
deglr6328 writes "Very soon, NASA will be dismantling and scrapping its only computer left which is able to access and process the data on its ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes. "Who cares", you say? Well, the Planetary Society for one and they're hoping you might care as well. The data held on these (few hundred) tapes is no ordinary forgettable data, it is the complete archive of the first 15 years of all the data returned to Earth by the Pioneer spacecraft which were sent into interstellar space. This additional and thus far unexamined data (the data after 1988 is available and has already been examined) may hold the key to solving what is considered one of the top problems in physics today, the so called Pioneer anomaly, where the observed trajectory of these spacecraft (and a couple others) deviates noticeably from our very precise expectation. The reason for the anomaly may be as mundane as uneven radiation pressure or escaping thruster fuel or it may be as groundbreaking as a clue to completely new physics, perhaps related to dark matter or dark energy. The Planetary Society is planning on recovering this data and poring over it meticulously to look for something which may have been missed or hidden from current investigations into the phenomenon. They need money to do this, about $250,000, and are asking for donations to fund the project. You do not need to be a member to donate. There are no serious proposals to send any more spin-stabilized spacecraft on solar escape trajectories any time in the near future and this is probably the only tenable method we have to directly investigate this mystery in the interim."
Why the deviance? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the difference of their expected trajectories have no commonality, it would seem to mean either some new force is affecting the craft differently, or each craft has its own mechanical explanation as to why they aren't staying the course.
Do *none* of these craft follow the expected trajectory? If not, then we really can't be sure whether this is a collection of mechanical issues or various effects of the unknown force. If one or two craft followed course perfectly, I would be inclined to say that the rest have mechanical issues knocking them off course.
9 track tapes (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a summer job a decade ago ripping 9-track tapes (geophys data) to CD-R (back when CD-Rs were $20 each and a burner was $5k!), pretty sure the people I did it for still have the gear. Planetary guys - I couldn't see a contact address on your page!
Lots of other data (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it, decades of climate data , going back to the 1970's, is being lost due to lethargy on the part of Clowngress. Or is it lethargy.
Let's see, three and a half decades of climate change data, detailed and explicit. Hmmmm.... who *wouldn't* want that data placed online where researchers could access it? I wonder.....
Re:Have you heard of Nero? (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly, I've worked for companies that paid a great deal of money to save their software assets that were stored on old, seemingly unreadable media (a shitload of Digital Research files, the recovery cost us $50k), and that data wasn't even close to the value of the Pioneer probe data. If that's what stops NASA from salvaging that data, somebody needs to be fired there...
Re:How much do you want to bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
All in all, remmeber you only have to take some data and wrap it in a protocol that is expressed on a differential pair. Not that hard...
Re:Why dismantle the computer (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is the operating cost. Those old machines are very VERY costly to run, between the power they need, the special rooms, and the ridiculous MTBF of the componentry that's measured in dozens of minutes.
But still, I agree. Scrapping the computer on that reason alone is forgetting the hundreds of millions spent on sending the probe out in space in the first place.
Re:Why dismantle the computer (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a physicist we had a DEC VAX with a tape drive, it took a whole room, and probably had less power than my laptop. Tape drives are not small things.
Re:So in short (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Congress allocates funding for NASA and thus is responsible for the lack of funds. You should contact your local Senate and House representatives if you wish to continue research in this area.
However, please note that due to beaurocracy alone, the cost of NASA performing this research is on the order of twenty times larger than an exterior organization which uses primarily volunteers and college students and collects money via donations and/or selling T-shirts.
A worthy cause, but $250,000.00?? (Score:2, Interesting)
but why the hell won't NASA just donate the computer and tapes to a university? If they're going to toss it in the trash, they should be interested in giving it away for free. Put the data on the Web for all, and we're done. In fact NASA themselves should be able to do this inside of a week or two, presumably they know how to read these tapes themselves..
I don't see where anyone needs to raise $250K..??
Please explain yourselves, planetary society types..
Frame dragging (Score:2, Interesting)
Next...
I think this is being distorted and dramatized (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that the issue is being distorted and blown out of proportion. I have a feeling that someone wanted to further their pet cause and they didn't mind letting pesky facts get in their way.
re: tape baking (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why you'll see plenty of people having no problem playing back 20+ year old tapes, yet others have huge problems.
Re:But how huge? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks to the Internet, and one international mail list I was a member of, I found a wonderful lady at a government data center who was willing to copy the data to a modern medium. And, it was a good thing I put in my request when I did; their one remaining 9 track tape drive was being decommissioned the next month!
A quick visit to the the UPS fairy and the tape was on its way. A week later I get an email to check a particular ftp for a tar ball and there it was: 30 mbs. - 7 years of research; a mere blip on a modern jump drive......
Dad was delighted. That data is now on CD, 4 separate hard drives in 2 physical locations, and even an actual paper printout.
Re:Archive in different format (Score:4, Interesting)
At my lab in grad school we had some Voyager tapes that were only readable by one type of (obsolete) machine. We always wanted to get rid of the machine because it was taking up a ton of space and was a bitch to keep working. But getting the people reasonsible to copy the data to a new format was an uphill battle because there was no money to pay someone (even a student) to do it.
I'm not saying that this is the way things should be or that priorities have been well-set, here. But the economic reality is that it's not as simple as you think.
Re:Have you heard of Nero? (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Note that the 'society' wants to get 1/4 million not just for the data conversion, but also a fund to study the data.
Quite frankly I might donate if it were simply to convert the data and make it publicly available. Note that they won't release the data until after it has been analyzed, and give no definite timeframe (months to a year).
Not that I'm against the project, but I don't know anything about this society, and the press release has very little information other than "Help us get our hands on the data by giving our society money." Do their members get access to the data as it's converted? What exactly is the process and timeline if they reach their goal? What happens to the money if they don't reach their goal?
-Adam
Re:I can help - RTFA please (Score:3, Interesting)
Will you please RTFA. It clearly says 7 and 9 track tapes.
But given the obvious age of your vehicle, I'm sure it can be lined up for a stand-in role in The Dukes of Hazzard 2 -- The Search for our Alienated Fans.
Re:How much do you want to bet... (Score:3, Interesting)
I just don't get it, here we have an agency full of engineers, and no one could think, "hey wouldn't it be cool to look at the data on a PC/Mac, a UNIX machine, or an IBM Mainframe?".
It's a shame, becuase more than likely most of the engineers involved with the original pioneer project would have been alive and able to otherwise contribute to such a conversion.
Now that so much time has passed, these things are much harder.
The high level tasks for the project would be:
1. Engineer a hardware solution that suports the comm(item 2) and data conversion(item 3). This is the really hard part. Maybe bypass the pioneer era computer and just design an interface from the tape reader to a serial port on a PC?
2. Some type of comm protocol recognizable by both sets of hardware. The burden of this is most likely going to have to be carried by the newer hardware. Not sure about the source platform and how programmable it is these days, but maybe we can teach a PC or UNIX box to speak 'old tape'. THe more I think about this, the more it sounds like we'd need to write 'drivers' for the old tape drives.
3. Devise a proper data mapping/converison scheme from pioneer to ascii (or ebcidic) based storage.
Involves probably writing conversion software on the receiving machine. (I'd love to take a crack at this myself to be honest.)
so we need:
1. conversion hardware
2. communications software (or driver for the old tape drives)
3. conversion software
Any analysis would take place using the output of 3.
Like I said above, I can't believe that no one at NASA has thought about this. SOmeone, somewhere must have had at least preliminary plans for something like this.
wbs.
Old drives aren't _that_ hard to find... (Score:3, Interesting)
And, if NASA is getting rid of an archaic machine and drives - someone should save it! There are LOTS of collectors out there, lots of hardware hackers and geeks like myself that love working on old machines, and could keep the machine operational and help transfer data.
In other words, yes, there is still a way to get data read in, even if you're sure that the media is too obsolete that nobody has a working drive. Nine track tapes, Magneto Optical, 8" floppies, Bernoulli cartridges, TK50 CompacTapes, QIC cartridges, MFM hard drives, SyQuest cartridges, paper tape, punched cards... The hardware is piled up all over the place, in the basements and bedrooms of people like me. Wether it's as common as a Commodore 64 5 1/4" floppy or as exotic as an Exatron Stringy Floppy or a 1600BPI nine track tape, chances are you can find someone with the machine and willing to help you.
Re:Have you heard of Nero? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Archive in different format (Score:3, Interesting)
An old friend of mine came into an old arcade game (defender) and the battery that kept the mainboard toasty (and the score history) had leaked acid all over it, nearly destroying it. He picked off what salvageable components were left on the board, scrounged around a number of dusty electronics stores to replace what could not be salvaged, bought a ROM programmer, made a new mainboard, slapped everything back together and the old game was restored. A few of the old pieces salvaged could not be made to work dependably and had to be replaced again, but over time the machine was back up and running.
The hard part is probably the media. I worked in radio for awhile and we were often faced with duplicating tapes after they'd exceeded a 5-7 year shelf life. I'm surprised that there was no plan for duping the data periodically to formats/platforms that could be sustained.
Re:Why the deviance? (Score:1, Interesting)
It's interesting that this is on the same order of magnitude as the critical acceleration in MOND [umd.edu]:
1.2*10^-10 m/s^2