[PIF]

Worse than this incident is much (and in some cases all) of the early probe data was discarded, including a lot of the Apollo data... some was not actually discarded, but lost in warehouses or deteriorated over time by poor storage conditions. Other data, like this story hints at, was only retrievable by using forgotten computer languages and compilers.

[texas booster]

My father helped design true 25-year mag tape for use at CERN, NASA and other projects that would generate enormous data tracks that would take years to decipher.

With the low cost of cloud storage, why couldn't we move this old data out to the cloud, with basic instruction manuals and compilers?

I understand that it might be petabytes of data that needs to be stored, but that just isn't that much money compared to the value of acquiring the data first hand.

And it could be done before all of the people who know the computer languages and formats have all passed on.

As hard as it will be to replace the Pioneer data streams, it is even harder to replace the human ingenuity that created it in the first place.