New thermal map of Asia
Nimbus II, 23 Sept 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.
Unfortunately, a lot of the old space data isn’t there anymore.
The Whale-Oil Shortage
There were special, durable tapes able to preserve irreplaceable space data. But when information technology regressed and these special tapes became scarce, what happened to the data?
…during the 1980s, the agency lost much of its old high-quality data. Its early tracking stations recorded satellite data on high-resolution master tapes that used whale oil to bind iron particles to the acetate. The whale oil made the tapes far more durable, but when commercial whaling was phased out in the mid-1980s, NASA couldn’t get such long-lasting tapes. So it reused old ones. NASA engineers taped over some 200,000 previously recorded master tapes, including high-resolution records from spacecraft as diverse as early Landsat satellites and Apollo 11, and preserved only low-resolution copies. “A huge amount of data was lost,” says Wingo.
Thermal maps from the 1960s… Polar ice coverage… “Already, the rediscovered Nimbus data are creating a stir among climate scientists.”
As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
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NASA will blame its incompetence on anything, even on whales. (What next, babies and puppies?)
Dr Drexler:
I think to prove (and utilized) the power molecular manufacturing, a useful product must be produced by a MM device that has certain advantages over other manufacturing methods.
I’m curious…?
1) What kind of novel product do you think will be produced by the first molecular manufacturing device?
2) Is it likely that this product (produced by very early MM devices) will be very powerful compared to what we have today ?
3) Do you think it would be able to be commercialised short time after its development?
Thanks
Thomas
P.S. I don’t quite get NASA’s decision to re-use the old tapes that contained important old data, do they not care about those data….if so why did they tape it in the first place…
@ Thomas — I often encounter questions like these, but I disagree with the dubious assumption of a sharp threshold in fabrication capabilities. In every fabrication technology to date, progress has been incremental, not abrupt. In outline, progress on the path to advanced molecular manufacturing will surely be similar.
Programmable molecular machine systems are in use already in biotechnology. Those machines can be imitated, and have already been re-engineered to some extent. The direction of advance from here is toward more complex structures, more advanced materials, and more diverse products. I see reason to expect accelerating progress toward products of extraordinary performance and diversity, but I see no reason to expect an identifiable “first molecular manufacturing device”, or an identifiable “first product”.
@ rrtucci — Puppies eat meat and would have increased the demand for whale meat (somewhere, to some extent), so there is indeed reason to blame them for the lost data. To an immeasurably small extent, yes, but in principle…
Babies, too, of course.
Sorry for my outburst :) It just sounds to me like “the puppy ate my homework” excuse.
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