The data tapes exist, but NASA no longer had the computer equipment to read them. Somebody had equipment, and a group bought an abandoned McDonald's and set up shop with the equipment to copy the tapes, process them, and retrieve usable data.
YESSSS, holy shit, another space nerd. Haha, username checks out. The project you're referring to was called the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). One very important correction to your comment, however: these tapes were from the Lunar Orbiter missions and not directly related to the telemetry data of the Apollo missions. Still, the project showcases the challenges and innovation that had to be deployed to recover and preserve this critical, historical data from the early years of space exploration. The mission's aim was to recover and digitize data from the Lunar Orbiter missions of the 1960s. These missions were all about mapping the Moon's surface to prep for the Apollo lunar landings.
But, it was basically the same challenge, so your comment totally holds. The original data tapes from the Lunar Orbiter missions were stored at the National Archives, but the tech to read them had become pretty much obsolete. So, in the early 2000s, a team led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing managed to get their hands on the old tape drives and tapes. They set up their operation in an abandoned McDonald's building at NASA Ames Research Center in California.
Thanks. I knew I'd read a long story about it, but misremembered exactly where the data was from.
BTW, I recently had 5 huge hard drives seemingly bit the dust. So right now, I'm in the process of hooking them up one at a time to copy everything off to a new NAS. The NAS has eight 16TB drives. I kept them separate instead of a RAID, as I've had problems before. It's odd that the drives seem to fail, but so far, I'm at #4 and still copying successfully. It takes close to a week for each one.
Hopefully I won't have to use data recovery on the remaining drive.
The data tapes exist, but NASA no longer had the computer equipment to read them. Somebody had equipment, and a group bought an abandoned McDonald's and set up shop with the equipment to copy the tapes, process them, and retrieve usable data.
YESSSS, holy shit, another space nerd. Haha, username checks out. The project you're referring to was called the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). One very important correction to your comment, however: these tapes were from the Lunar Orbiter missions and not directly related to the telemetry data of the Apollo missions. Still, the project showcases the challenges and innovation that had to be deployed to recover and preserve this critical, historical data from the early years of space exploration. The mission's aim was to recover and digitize data from the Lunar Orbiter missions of the 1960s. These missions were all about mapping the Moon's surface to prep for the Apollo lunar landings.
But, it was basically the same challenge, so your comment totally holds. The original data tapes from the Lunar Orbiter missions were stored at the National Archives, but the tech to read them had become pretty much obsolete. So, in the early 2000s, a team led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing managed to get their hands on the old tape drives and tapes. They set up their operation in an abandoned McDonald's building at NASA Ames Research Center in California.
Nice work, frog.
Thanks. I knew I'd read a long story about it, but misremembered exactly where the data was from.
BTW, I recently had 5 huge hard drives seemingly bit the dust. So right now, I'm in the process of hooking them up one at a time to copy everything off to a new NAS. The NAS has eight 16TB drives. I kept them separate instead of a RAID, as I've had problems before. It's odd that the drives seem to fail, but so far, I'm at #4 and still copying successfully. It takes close to a week for each one.
Hopefully I won't have to use data recovery on the remaining drive.