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The journal Nature has a story on new information obtained by re-processing Voyager2 data.
Erich Karkoschka, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, chased down the new detail by comparing 1,600 images taken by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft during a flyby in 1986. “To me it felt like there was a new space mission to Uranus,” he said. “I applied new image-processing techniques so I could see features that other people couldn't see.”
This reprocessing has uncovered an unusual and unexpected rotational pattern in the atmosphere, which could give clues on the internal structure of the planet.
The story is also covered at Universe Today, and University of Arizona News.
There is a vast amount of raw data publicly available from NASA's National Space Science Data Center, and from the UAnews link:
Karkoschka's work illustrates the scientific value that can be gleaned from data that have been around for a long time, available to anyone with Internet access. He had similar success when he investigated 13-year-old Voyager images of Uranus’ surroundings and discovered the satellite Perdita.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Covalent on Friday November 14 2014, @04:58PM
... information wants to be FREE!
Seriously, there are no copyright issues here...there's no intellectual property of any value...the scientists who worked on this mission are long since retired (or dead). The flyby was in 1986! Kudos to NASA for releasing the data, but it's 20 years too late.
The real place I think this issue matters is with the data from drug trials. Those should be opened up after some reasonable (short) period of time. I think the nerd community (I'm looking at you, soylentils) might find many flaws before innocent people have to die. Probably won't happen because of some IP BS argument, but if government money funded any part of the drug, the data should be liberated eventually.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hubie on Friday November 14 2014, @08:34PM
It isn't 20 years too late. I don't know exactly what data set he used, but most spacecraft data are put up on NSSDC in a pretty timely manner. If you can't download it from the web site, there are other ways to get the data.