| David Mandl on Fri, 3 Aug 2001 15:11:08 +0200 (CEST) |
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[From RISKS-List, Volume 21, Issue 56...] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 23:31:43 -0700 (PDT) From: Aaron Dickey <[email protected]> Subject: NASA data from 1970s lost due to "forgotten" file format In 1999, USC neurobiologist Joseph Miller asked NASA to check some old data the Viking probes had sent back from Mars in the mid-1970s. Miller wanted to find out whether certain information on gas released by Martian soil, which at the time had been dismissed as meaningless "chemical activity," was actually evidence of microbial life. NASA found the tapes he requested, but they didn't find any way to read them. It turns out that the data, despite being only about 25 years old, was in a format NASA had long since forgotten about. Or, as Miller puts it, "The programmers who knew it had died." Luckily, Miller has been able to cobble together about a third of the data and get some useful results, but only because some form of printed record had been saved. (And yes, he does believe the Viking probes turned up evidence of microbes.) Source: Reuters. Original article is available, at least temporarily, at <http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010727/sc/space_mars_life_dc_1.html>, <http://news.excite.com/news/r/010727/19/science-space-mars-life-dc>, <http://reuters.activebuddy.com/s?id=DS1DEKNG8BBN>, or <http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=sciencenews&StoryID=137333>. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Dave Mandl [email protected] [email protected] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list [email protected] http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold