Techno-Archaeology Reveals Oldest NASA Satellite Image

Most of the time when data gets old, it gets lost forever. This could be from the data being forgotten, with it being placed on old equipment that breaks, or as in the case of the original moon landing, the data could be overwritten. Recently researchers have been able to recover some lost images from NASA’s Nimbus II satellite. From the MoonViews blog post:

Last month, researchers working out of an abandoned McDonald’s restaurant on the grounds of NASA Ames Research Center recovered data collected by NASA’s Nimbus II satellite on 23 September 1966. The satellite soared over Earth in a polar orbit every 108 minutes, taking pictures of cloud cover and measuring heat radiated from the planet’s surface, and creating a photo mosaic of the globe 43 years ago. The resulting image is the oldest and most detailed from NASA’s Earth-observing satellites. It’s also the latest success story in what researchers call techno-archaeology: pulling data from archaic storage systems. Once forgotten and largely unreadable with modern equipment, old data tapes are providing researchers with new information on changes in the surfaces of Earth and the moon…

via Dumpster Diving for Science (MoonViews – Providing Imagery and Data For Lunar Exploration)

via : Technoarcheology and Earth Sciences, the Recovery of Nimbus II High Resolution Infrared Radiometer Data

This story written by Paul Adams

Paul Adams leads an award-winning, diverse contractor team that runs a federal high performance computing facility where he has worked for 17 years. He loves getting his hands on the latest visualization and computer hardware, astronomy, aerospace engineering, working with the poor, and ringing cowbells.