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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 Whoever on Wednesday May 02 2018, @05:37AM (7 children)
I hope they only used that old VAX to read the tapes, then immediately transferred the data to a modern machine.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday May 02 2018, @07:54AM (2 children)
I’m for traditional cyber. People's opinions about cyber are changing rapidly. Spectre & Meltdown, big problems with some of the new cyber. And so much of the new cyber comes from China, maybe, probably they can wiretapp that. Huawei & ZTE. My Generals say, be careful. Because nobody knows if they're doing a wiretapp!!!
(Score: 5, Funny) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday May 02 2018, @08:26AM (1 child)
I put on my robe and wizard hat...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 02 2018, @04:01PM
I skipped the robe.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Wednesday May 02 2018, @01:13PM (3 children)
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday May 02 2018, @01:31PM (2 children)
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)
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
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.
(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.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 1) by adun on Wednesday May 02 2018, @08:10AM
All you folks are being happy about new data and urging folks to preserve it and whatnot, and I'm sitting here like an idiot, being happy just because I'm seeing a VAX in the news again :-).
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Wednesday May 02 2018, @08:13AM (4 children)
I have in front of me a copy of VAX FORTRAN (V4.7) on seven track tape which I recently saved from being thrown into a skip. However I don't have anything to read said tape with.
There's a moral to this story here...
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday May 02 2018, @08:17AM (1 child)
Correction: it's probably a nine-track rather than a 7-track, given its age (1987). Still 1/2" diameter, anyhow.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday May 03 2018, @02:38AM
You meant 1/2" wide, not diameter.
Yes, 9-track (8 data bits, 1 parity) 1/2" is quite common and there are still many functioning tape drives in the world.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday May 02 2018, @09:22AM
Yeah, you're a hoarder. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday May 02 2018, @01:06PM
Yea, that copyright needs to be revised so you don't have to keep the tapes hidden under a rock for another hundred years before you are legally allowed to share a copy with us.