Perpetual data storage will save the world lots of tomorrow’s hassles. NASA knows why.
The first lunar explorations date back to the end of the Sixties and have of course been recorded and photographed and shown to the world.
But where are those tapes today? What crucial data are they hiding and how could we access it today? A new professional figure is recently born and it specializes in… jurassic data recovery, so to speak. One of the leading experts in the field is Dennis Wingo, head of Skycorp Inc., an aerospace engineering company based in Huntsville, Ala. His later efforts have been put into running the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The goal is to recover and put to use as many of the original lunar landing images as possible.
Between 1966 and 1967 , the moon’s surface has been mapped inch-by-inch by the Lunar Orbiters probes with a resolution varying from one to 40 meters. Having the chance to recover these images today is of great scientific value: NASA’s goal is to compare this older data with recent one, in order to understand the number and size of meteor impacts that have occurred in the meantime and consequently calculate impact threats to Earth.
But doing this was all but easy: the images were shot on 70 mm. film that was automatically developed and scanned within the robot spacecraft. So Wingo’s work was first to find these 2-in tapes and than reconstruct the drivers to read them. These machinery was in fact mostly dumped in the ocean and is now covered in coral reef.
The task was not easy: this is half a ton refrigerator-resembling analog Ampex FR-900 reel-to-reel units we are talking about. Spare parts and components are no less than archeological findings, since these drivers have not been manufactured since 1975.
Wingo was able to obtain $250,000 from NASA to get the Ampex back from the dead. “We had to pay big bucks to get the bearings replaced, the motors rebuilt and rubber parts cast. We had to dip the motors in liquid nitrogen to get the bearings off,” he recalls. Having learned his lesson, what Wingo delivered to NASA was not the images themselves, but the raw data he was able to extract from the tapes.
“They would rather have the raw data so that someone even a thousand years from now could do their own processing,” he says.
Lots of work, lots of money and lots of time was invested in this recovery project, making it a great example of how we should treat data with respect and be sure to both update its format and save older supports for future studies and knowledge.
There is one important question to keep in mind after we snap a picture, write an e-mail, sign a document or listen to a song: will I be storing this data properly and safely afterwards? Otherwise… what’s really the point?
