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American scientists unearth lost 1960s polar satellite images
- astrodust 12y agoIt's pretty amazing that something pushing the absolute limit of technology in the 1960s is now something that you could bundle up, throw together as a torrent, and publish for anyone curious enough to look at it.
- melling 12y agoNot really. Moore's Law over 50 years. http://observationdeck.io9.com/comparison-of-lunar-module-navigation-computer-with-an-880735459 http://observationdeck.io9.com/comparison-of-lunar-module-na... Too bad other fields haven't progressed. Commercial supersonic flight, for example, would be nice. In 1970, I'm sure they would have predicted 2-3-5 the speed of sound by now.
- astrodust 12y agoTo deny that Moore's law is amazing is amazingly ignorant.
- melling 12y agoHuh, didn't realize that's what I did. Are you sure that you didn't just misread what I wrote? I thought by this point that it was well known, well documented, and well established. So, any technology influenced by it should come with certain expectations that shouldn't surprise anyone reading HN. Now, try not to be amazed by Moore's law but by saddened by the lack of progress in other fields. There's a lot of work to do.
- rmsaksida 12y agoI find old data strangely fascinating. I actually enjoy working with legacy systems every now and then - the older the better. There's something therapeutic about carefully making sense out of old and/or poorly maintained data. I wonder if there's a business opportunity in this area, especially for digital data. Something like a consultancy specialized in extracting legacy data and migrating it to modern databases where it could easily queried.
- RevRal 12y agoI have some pretty bad memories of transferring the information from a lot of columnar pads into a database. (We kept the pads)
- bhhaskin 12y agoYou bet there is. There are millions (possibly billions) of dollars a year spent on maintaining outdated systems and equipment.
- mtdewcmu 12y agoI think it's not so strange -- digging through old data in archives is what historians do. If you compiled your findings into a book, you'd be writing bona fide history. History is stupendously fascinating. What dawned on me in college is that history is much more than retelling stories that have already been told. By doing archival research, you're making it possible to tell entirely new stories, because only after events are over is the data available to to compile and synthesize what actually occurred in fine-grained detail. These stories can be unknown to the participants. It's tremendously important work. In the sense that history attaches meaning to otherwise meaningless human events, history is nothing less than the search for meaning itself. Fascinating indeed.
- oftenwrong 12y agoIn school, in science class and history class, I always felt we focused too much on "what we know", and not enough on "how we know it".
- mtdewcmu 12y agoI got more of a sense of how research is done in college as opposed to high school. I think the simple fact is that there's a lot more information to teach that falls in the "what" category. The actual hands-on work of historians is not something you really study in detail unless you're a history major, I think (I wasn't). In the case of science, I think virtually all children learn about how science experiments are done and the scientific method early in their science education -- perhaps that wasn't quite what you meant. You might be right that the how doesn't get enough focus. But I think that if a student is interested enough in science to be a scientist, that person will not be deterred by missing out on that.
- DrStalker 12y agoHow is the data "worth billions"? That may have been the original cost, but the original cost isn't the same as the value today.
- chillax 12y agoLinkbait title. From the end: "The original cost to American taxpayers to gather the images was in the billions (in today’s dollars). “For a few hundred thousand dollars I could get it all back,” he says."
- sheltgor 12y agoI do think, though, that as lake99 pointed out there could be TREMENDOUS value in this. Extending our image record a full 17 years is has enormous scientific value. It gave examples of imagery of the Aral Sea, which allows for significant study there, and 17 years more of full polar ice records. All of that has pretty big implications for a number of fields.
- soperj 12y agoIt's not really extending it by 17 years though since they don't have data for the full 17 years. They have snapshots from 17 years prior to the start of actual data collection.
- sheltgor 12y agoI haven't actually poured through the data set linked in the article, but skimming it gives the impression that it includes a variety of images from 1964-70, which seems to me like a lot more than just a snapshot. It even mentions in the article that they were able to see multiple years of polar ice.
- soperj 12y agoThat would still be a snapshot. There is no monthly data, or even yearly on the same date by the sounds of things, nor does it backfill up to 1979(when we started actually collecting data)
- jakeogh 12y agoAbout a year ago the Avaneya project released software that can decode the Viking Lander tapes. A few tapes conatain images that were (as far as I know) never released. Samples: https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1 https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1 https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Avaneya:_Viking_Lander_Remastered_DVD https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Avaneya:_Viking_Lander_Remast...
- raphaelj 12y agoCan someone explain how they were able to take and send such high quality digital pictures back then? This is amazing!
- danbruc 12y agoAccording to Wikipedia they used a movable mirror that reflected the light to 12 photo diodes for different wave lengths and then they just scanned the environment from left to right (or maybe the other way round) with five vertical lines of 512 pixels per second. The 300° panoramas are made out of 9150 (vertical) lines. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program#Camera.2FImaging_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program#Camera.2FImaging...
- hindsightbias 12y agowww.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sheets/viking.pdf UHF 1Kb/sec to the orbiter, also could use S-Band direct to earth at a lower bandwidth. The orbiter could buffer 40 Mb. Not sure how fast its link to the DSN was. ed: 16Kb/sec in there too. Example DSN doc: ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report2/42-33/33C.PDF My memory was everything was first shown grayscale, and then color. Not sure if that was a ground processing thing or the lander/orbiter sent two streams. Maybe the orbiter buffered the deeper bits and sent 8bit for near-realtime enjoyment.
- dwc 12y ago(Educated) guess: the monochrome image was simply the first wavelength band that came down. The later color image could be composed after the other bands were received.
- kamakazizuru 12y agothe reference to dark data is interesting - I didn't know there was still so much data out there that hadn't been digitized! This kind of stuff would be great for a kickstarter campaign though..
- gooseus 12y agoYes, exactly... someone kickstart this man kickstarting this "dark data" organization. They could easily make large glossy prints of that satellite photo for rewards and make the top tier something like "Fly out to have lunch with the recovery team and get an original film tape (already recovered)".
- thrownaway2424 12y ago16-bit? Did they mean 4-bit?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- edmccard 12y ago>16-bit? Did they mean 4-bit? This batch of recovered Nimbus images was converted from film to digital; there was another [1] where the analog data from magentic tape was digitized. [1] http://www.moonviews.com/2010/03/dumpster-diving-for-science.html http://www.moonviews.com/2010/03/dumpster-diving-for-science...
- thrownaway2424 12y agoInteresting. I was thrown off by their characterization of the images as "grainy 16-bit grayscale satellite pictures" as the word grainy seems to connote poor image quality, while 16 bits of gray is excellent. Perhaps what they are (confusingly) trying to say is a very good scan of grainy film.
- craftsman 12y agoThese data are available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC): http://nsidc.org/data/nimbus/index.html http://nsidc.org/data/nimbus/index.html
- femto 12y agoA similar stash of data data is in the libraries of the agencies that did the research for the various over-the-horizon-radars around the world. Australia's DSTO has rooms full of magnetic tapes with decades worth of ionospheric measurements on them.
- spikels 12y agoA bit more detail here including picture of the "data" (i.e. metal film cans): http://nsidc.org/monthlyhighlights/2013/04/glimpses-of-sea-ice-past/ http://nsidc.org/monthlyhighlights/2013/04/glimpses-of-sea-i... Which linked to this paper in the journal "The Cryosphere": http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/699/2013/tc-7-699-2013.pdf http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/699/2013/tc-7-699-2013.pdf
- Hugie 12y agoGoogle should use this data as an overlay for google maps :) I would love to watch that data on that way. Any google employees reading this? ;)
- orjan 12y agoI'm confused by this bit: "...the scientists had recorded the images on magnetic tape, played it back on a TV monitor, then snapped photographs of the TV monitor. What he had were those images, sporadically placed along rolls of film as long as the wingspan of a Boeing 787." Can someone elaborate on this?
- kalleboo 12y agoSounds like Kinescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope - But instead of capturing the full framerate of the original video like you would for TV, they only captured one frame per visible slice of land to save space
- gambiting 12y agoThey did the same thing for the video from the moon. The feed from the lander was displayed on a TV in the control room,and then that TV was being filmed by a camera pointed at it. If I remember correctly it was to do with a different format than used by the US television, and lack of equipment which could covert such material in real time.