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

[jim stephens]

I've been in the archive building where tapes are stored at JPL.

There was a problem with a water pipe burst in the past, which
some tapes were exposed to.

Also, from age, some are having oxide come off the substrate, and
are probably unrecoverable quite a long time before this problem
was discovered.

I don't know of any imminent scrapping of anything there, does
anyone have any real data on what that statement means?  I am
sure that they have equipment that doesn't work, and I am sure
from what I've seen in scrap from JPL in the distant (80's) past
that things may have been scrapped long before there was a good
effort to match computer to tape and do all conservation necessary,
but they have an agressive program to move everything to a cd
rom type media format, and the have very good conservation
efforts on that archive in the future.

Jim

CRC wrote: