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NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede
NASA scientists have made some new discoveries about Jupiter's giant moon Ganymede, thanks to a dedicated team, an elderly VAX machine and 20-year-old data from the long-defunct Galileo probe.
Fifteen years after Galileo (no, not that one) ended its days with a plunge into the atmosphere of Jupiter, NASA scientists have resurrected the 20-year-old datasets and added more detail to the puzzle of Ganymede's magnetosphere.
The new data, published in Geophysical Research Letters [DOI: 10.1002/2017GL075487] [DX], paints a picture of a stormy environment, with particles blasted off the moon's icy surface by incoming plasma raining down from Jupiter.
Ganymede is the solar system's largest and most massive satellite, but has slightly lower surface gravity than the Moon (0.146g vs 0.165g). Like many other icy objects in the solar system, Ganymede may have liquid oceans capable of supporting life. ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) will fly by Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa before eventually orbiting Ganymede. It may also include a Russian-built Ganymede lander.
Also at NASA.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday May 02 2018, @06:30AM (6 children)
I would hope that NASA has a person whose job description includes preserving data that is potentially valuable and difficult to replace.
I have files on my laptop that are more than twenty years old. Maybe not every DOOM WAD, but certainly the 12MB AVI file I once downloaded over dialup (almost, but not quite, as hard to obtain as probe readings from another planet)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by suburbanitemediocrity on Wednesday May 02 2018, @07:35AM (1 child)
This was my job thirty years ago...actually only part of my job, I worked in the archives writing image processing software. And it was for JPL, but I was very familiar with the VAX and image processing system (called VICAR). It was a bunch of libraries for loading saving and manipulating images. I remember it being very slow and could spend a whole day on a single image - something that is done in real time today. I was only 18 and it was a major rush to having a key to the archives where I could go and look at whatever I wanted. Everything was on 12" rtr magnetic tape. Once we got a package from the Soviet Union holding raw Venera images.
If there's a moral to the story it is that NASA should publicly release all raw data as it comes in and not keep it secret so that some scientist gets exclusive access for years to write a paper and not be upstaged by some high school kid with a bootlegged copy of photoshop and crazy ideas on hydrocarbon ice alluvial patterns.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 02 2018, @05:51PM
> If there's a moral to the story it is that NASA should publicly release all raw data as it comes in
A hundred million times this.
Sure, we'd have all sorts of conspiracy whackjobs build elaborate theories about some artifact that they don't understand is part of the detector's tradeoffs. Sure, the Chinese scientists would read data that their government didn't pay to acquire. But having valuable knowledge archived on a few million hard drives all over the planet is a Really Good Idea.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 02 2018, @08:26AM (2 children)
They didnt even preserve the original moonlanding tapes:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday May 02 2018, @06:02PM
They didnt even preserve the original moonlanding tapes:
Or even worse, Dr. Who! [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday May 03 2018, @12:54AM
There really is no excuse for not preserving EVERYTHING regarding Apollo 11, everybody at the time knew it was historic. Of course on the other hand everybody also thought it was the beginning of what would be missions leading to permanent settlements by now. So they knew it was historic, they just didn't know it was THE crowning achievement of their civilization and they needed to be preserving things for the coming Dark Age.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday May 02 2018, @02:12PM
Somewhere I still have the Zip disk where I installed MacBSD from 12-20 floppy disk images I downloaded using ZTerm.
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