Re: Apollo telemetry tapes missing?

In article <melba29hmjnmcfovpbnhgd86v9p2ofosc2@xxxxxxx>,
Jud McCranie <youknowwhat.mccranie@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is losing this data a problem ?? When were these 18 min. ?? Was this
Telemetry ever really meant to be kept ??

I thought that it would at least be interesting to keep for historical
reasons.

You'd be surprised how little clout "historical reasons" have when
somebody is out of storage space and starts eyeing those racks full of
tapes that nobody's looked at in decades...

A recent example of this is that the engineering/telemetry tapes from the
Pioneer 10 and 11 missions were recently just barely saved. Folks were
cleaning up, and the dumpster was already on site, when the people
investigating the "Pioneer anomaly"(*) came asking if the tapes still
existed... *Now* all that stuff will go into permanent archives, but it
almost didn't.

(* This is the mysterious and still-unaccounted-for slight sunward
acceleration acting on the Pioneers, above and beyond all known factors
influencing their trajectories, which just possibly perhaps might point to
new physics of some kind. One of the efforts now underway is reanalysis
of *all* the Pioneer data -- including recovering old tracking data from
earlier parts of the missions, and recovering the engineering data that
records spacecraft events, temperatures, attitude, etc. -- to see what can
be learned from it. In particular, just establishing where the mysterious
apparent acceleration points -- toward the Sun, toward the Earth, along
the antenna axis, or back along the trajectory (these are similar but not
identical directions) -- would greatly shorten the list of possible
explanations. )
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: does light travel at a straight line?
    ... of the physics community. ... The "so-called" anomaly of the Pioneer 10 and 11 crafts on their ... Because the outer planets are not on hyperbolic escape trajectories, ... work (no expenditure of energy). ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Re: OT: Speaking of mp3 sound quality...
    ... Perusing through a large thrift shop one day, in the "record section", I ... that Pioneer from the manufacturer's analog tapes at 7 1/2 ips with NO ... reel tapes trying to squeeze every sheckel out of every song. ... Even the autoreverse signals work on the Pioneer. ...
    (rec.boats)