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posted by martyb on Wednesday May 02 2018, @04:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-that's-old-is-new-again dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Wednesday May 02 2018, @01:13PM (3 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Wednesday May 02 2018, @01:13PM (#674546)

    I hope they only used that old VAX to read the tapes, then immediately transferred the data to a modern machine.

    Why, because seeing anything that isn't an Apple iPhone still running somehow offends you?

    You might want to avoid the Vintage Computing Festivals, your head might explode in to pixelated chunks.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday May 02 2018, @01:31PM (2 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Wednesday May 02 2018, @01:31PM (#674550) Homepage

    Maybe because reliance on technology that old - when you can pull the raw data into a modern system along with a billion other space missions and analyse it more easily and collectively - is probably a brighter idea than leaving it on a tape that you can't read on a machine that nobody understands any more and can't process one millionth the speed/data that a decent modern datacentre could.

    The best way to "preserve" data is to constantly move it forward into every format and storage medium you get, as you go, rather than hope you can still read that tape in 40 years time.

    To be honest, another 40 years and the VAX probably wouldn't be working, the tape would be entirely unreadable, and it would literally be someone's job to hope the documentation was correct (and readable) and recreate the FORTRAN code to pull it off as if FORTRAN was an unknown foreign language, rather than "something my dad remembers and I can still buy books on".

    • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Wednesday May 02 2018, @03:09PM (1 child)

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Wednesday May 02 2018, @03:09PM (#674592)

      Do you still use wheels? Those are oooold! :P

      OF COURSE they would have analyzed the data with whatever their current supported, and well understood, software is on their current supported, and (hopefully) well understood hardware. TFA doesn't even say why the VAX machine was supposedly involved. If I recall correctly, most data recovery services read data directly from tapes in to a Linux box. There would be little or no need to involve additional hardware.

      I suspect the TFA just mentioned the VAX system for the heck of it. Even if someone there had kept one running, it is best to send important tapes to a pro or you really risk damaging them.

      • (Score: 2) by ledow on Friday May 04 2018, @10:22AM

        by ledow (5567) on Friday May 04 2018, @10:22AM (#675567) Homepage

        Good luck using any kind of wheel from a classic car on a new one, and complying with modern safety standards.

        Even the wheel has evolved to the point that old ones are useless. You can no more stick a cartwheel directly on a Ford than you can a VAX tape on a Windows PC.