Rescue of data from Pioneer 10 & 11 tapes at JPL needed.

[CRC]

On  Sat, 4 Jun 2005 16:01:32 -0400  "Bill Dawson"  
<whdawson at localisps.net> wrote:

> I came across this very interesting, on topic story about
> the detection of an anomalous acceleration, the need to
> recover data which "exists on a few hundred ancient 7- and
> 9-track magnetic tapes", and the imminent scrapping of the
> original computers at:
>
> http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/pioneer_anomaly1_0510.html
>
[...]
The U of Arizona had the imaging experiments on the two spacecraft  
and a friend worked on the data reduction team. I got the following  
from him: The tracking stations recorded the data on analog tape and  
then converted it to digital and transmitted it to JPL which then  
retransmitted it to Ames (and possibly Goddard)  which had spacecraft  
responsibility. He believed the analog data was kept for some time at  
the tracking stations (he had some data retransmitted occasionally up  
to 3 months after reception), but does not know how long.

Ames had a program called SOLDPS (sp?) that received the data,  
recorded it, and divided it up between experimental teams utilizing  
an IBM 360/90 pair. The UofA got 7-track tapes in fixed block, ASCII,  
stranger tapes that were taken apart on the local CDC (which only had  
7-track tapes). He believed other teams received both 7-track and 9- 
track tapes written in IBM EBSIDC standard form as require by the  
local computer systems.

The point he made is that each experimenter knew what their data  
meant and had their own analysis programs - a virtual tower of Babel...

He believed that the Pioneers were unique at that time in that they  
used the received carrier to generate the transmitted carrier. This  
created an interferometer which, if he remembers correctly, placed  
the distance to the spacecraft to a meter or so.

Tucked away in one of his storage modules he has the Space Craft  
Bible for those beasts and he promises to pull it out one of these  
days - should be interesting reading.

     CRC