Digitized Pioneer 10&11 computer tapes Options

[apollo16uvc]

Hello forum members,

Pretty much in the last two years I have taken up a new 'hobby', which consists of acquiring space flight audio, video and data tapes and digitizing them.

With the help of others around the world I've digitized audio, video and data ranging from Apollo, Skylab missions to the Pioneer 10/11 and original satellite telemetry tapes from the 50's and 60's.

This topic will focus on the Pioneer tapes. First, a heads up:

Last year I bought 4 Pioneer computer tapes from Ebay. These tapes were at one point used at the state uni of Arizona.
Because of the writing on the tapes, and the origin, I suspected these tapes may contain imagery data from the Pioneer probes. As the label mentions "Pioneer 11 EDR UA/IPP data" and the state uni of Arizona worked on the Pioneer imagery devices.

Some photos of the tapes below:



I have send these tapes to Chuck, who owns a data recovery company in America. Chuck has experience with NASA tapes and has highly specializes equipment to be able to digitize all sorts of formats and data densities. He saves the data from the tapes in the SIMH format, which is kind of like the ISO format, as it does not only contain the binary data but also tape markers, and separates the data frames into blocks as it would be on a real tape. because of this, you have a 100% copy of the data and tape formatting.

So far, two tapes (QK7992H and Pione-4138N), has been digitized. One other is troublesome to read, and one appears to be wiped. Chuck is currently occupied with more important matters but will give the tapes an other pass when he has the time.

Tape QK7992H
This tape contains 6 MB of data, and 12 files.
Each file contains ASCII metadata.
We have confirmed 6 of the 12 files are image files, and have processed them to how we think it works. 3 are B/W images and 3 are colour.


See the following 3 B/W images:


And a colour image:


This archive file contains the data we have processed of QK7992H so far:
https://archive.org/download/SpaceData/Pion...essed-Alpha.zip

We don't know what to do with the remaining 6 files, they have metadata like the image files.

Tape Pione-4138N
We are not sure what to do with this tape. The labels claim it contains EDR UA/IPP data.
So this tape might have raw imagery data from the Pioneer IPP (Imaging PhotoPolarimeter).

In order to further process the data, we are looking for the following document that will hopefully tell us how to work the data:
PN F/G OFFLINE DATA PROCESSING SYSTEM DESCRIPTION" "NASA/ARC PC-262


Master archive:
Documentation, photos, raw data and processed data can be found on the link below:
https://archive.org/details/SpaceData

I may make more topics for the other tapes if people are interested.

If you want to help, please do not be afraid to reach out to me here, or via PM.

Best regards,
Niels

[RoverDriver]

I briefly looked at some of the unknown files and it looks like these are copies of punch cards. The C at the beginning of the line was a comment card, those who don't have a C in the first column contain real data. It also looks like you have lots of read errors as they contain several lines with garbage.

Although I never heard about sticky shed syndrome on digital tapes, only on analog, it is possible some of the tapes can be baked before reading them. I assume that whomever has done data recovery and has a 9 track tape read machine knows what sticky shed is and how it affects reading tapes. If not, just PM me, it is a well known subject and dealt with my analog audio tapes in the past.

Paolo