soapbox

it’s lame to just link-post, esp from /. but oh well, it’s well said so that’s what i’ll do.

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. This additional and thus far unexamined data (the data after 1988 is available and has already been examined) may hold the key to solving what is considered one of the top problems in physics today, the so called Pioneer anomaly, where the observed trajectory of these spacecraft (and a couple others) deviates noticeably from our very precise expectation.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 5:22 pm and is filed under geek, television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.