Tuesday, July 26, 2005





Help Solve the Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly

"Very soon, NASA will be dismantling and scrapping its only computer left which is able to access and process the data on its ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes. 'Who cares', you say? Well, the Planetary Society for one and they're hoping you might care as well. The data held on these (few hundred) tapes is no ordinary forgettable data, it is the complete archive of the first 15 years of all the data returned to Earth by the Pioneer spacecraft which were sent into interstellar space."

If we're not pleading with NASA to fix things then we're begging them not to destroy things. First the Hubble; now this. If only the Pentagon had to put up with bullshit like this.

4 comments:

RJU said...

Thanks Mac, for letting us know about this. I hope my donation helps.

Mac said...

It's absurd that someone has to ask for a donation in the first place; the "Pioneer Anomaly" might be the best evidence yet re. "dark matter" -- people should be falling over themselves trying to figure out what's on those tapes.

Kyle said...

Mac -

What I find extremely interesting is that the article includes this quote:
"Very soon, NASA will be dismantling and scrapping its only computer left which is able to access and process the data on its ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes...".

The (in)famous John Titor was supposedly sent here from the future to retrievs a computer from a museum, because in his "present" there were none remaining, and one was required to fix a "future" computer problem. At the time, I thought it was a silly assertion.

But this story shows that there CAN be a "last computer" for a given purpose, and once it's gone, it's gone, and the data it could read can be rendered useless.

There are plenty of other holes in the Titor story, but this article brought it back to mind with a punch!

While I'm somewhat dubious of the value of the Pioneer data to shed light on "dark matter", it certainly couldn't hurt, and the machine and its data should be kept intact or transferred to other media as an investment in the taxpayers' interest in sending Pioneer out there in the first place.

If its mission was to collect data and it did the job, we can only do ourselves(and perhaps the future) harm by destroying the product of that mission. It would be hypocritical and irresponsible to have spent the money to collect the data, and then trash it due to cost. Pretzel logic, IMO.

Best,

Kyle
UFOreflections.blogspot.com.

stankan said...

It would seem to me that the data could be transferred to cd rom, and read by another computer with the appropriate software loaded.

Stan