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.

[mike]

I think that the lossless aspect of digital data makes it preferable even if logical and physical formats keep changing. It's not that hard to just build a tape reader that can read whatever format you need - tape technology has been around for quite a while, and I believe that information on the exact specifications of whatever format you're trying to read will persist for quite some time as well. And I would think that usually you wouldn't have to build a reading device from scratch - electronic components tend to last quite a while, and even if they don't, they are basically the same as they've always been since they were invented.