Pioneer Data, In search of digital data... Options

[tedstryk]

Tomorrow I will be stopping by our library. Some material has come in, but I am not sure what it consists of. To make a long story short, it appears that, although the Saturn part seems to be listed in the NSSDC catalogue, other than the three Pionner ring images (one red/blue set and one red image alonge) and the Io set, the digital data is lost, save any scraps that can be recovered from various places. This material may contain some more images...tomorrow I will know. The good news is that after looking at the available digital sets, there isn't much if anything that can be pulled out of them that can't be saved by just cleaning up the prints of the other images.

[Phil Stooke]

Good points about digital data. There are negatives, though. Having suitable hardware and software to read it is one - it's already difficult to track down hardware for reading some old tape formats. And media degradation is another. I back up on CDs now, but how long will they be readable? We are going to be committed in the long run to the constant migration of data from format to format, to keep it readable and safe. I can put my CDs on a DVD, or on a little flash drive... but think of having to migrate the entire content of PDS every ten years or so. The difficulties we are having trying to recover old Soviet data are another example. In general, digital archiving is a real headache.

Phil