You NEVER know what’s going to turn up at DRMO. I was poking around govdeals one afternoon and NASA was dumping a short ton of technical pieces, almost guarantee they wound up as scrap.

I dearly hope there are NASA collectors who poke around that site.

Four years ago, an abandoned NASA spacecraft was attempted to by “pirated” by a group of citizens (with permission of its original owner, so it was not technically pirated). Talking to it was a problem, as the NASA systems were already gone. The group of citizens received quite a bit of help, from NASA, organizations, and fellow citizens.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140619-space-sun-nasa-astronomy-crowdsourcing/

There’s a company we’re working with called Ettus Research, and they have a piece of hardware that has software that emulates all of the hardware equipment NASA used to have.

Thank goodness that someone can emulate at least some of NASA’s obsolete equipment.

This is not always the case. Britain tried a “Doomsday Project” to celebrate the “Doomsday Book” after the Norman conquest of England. The original 900-year old book still exists and can be read, with some interpretation of abbreviations and Latin, but the data collected on computer media for the celebration could hardly be read after a mere 25 years (where were PDFs when they were really needed?).

In the proceeding quarter century, the technology became obsolete, making the content on the discs inaccessible to all but a few enthusiasts.

Wodun wrote: “Of course, there isn’t much glory in that for PI’s. But it would allow for endless study and discovery in the future.”

Isn’t that why God gave us grad students?

This gives some idea of the challenge

https://www.wired.com/2014/04/lost-lunar-photos-recovered-by-great-feats-of-hackerdom-developed-at-a-mcdonalds/

“Among those on the committee who chose the music for the disc was the cosmologist, astrophysicist and popularizer of all things astronomical Carl Sagan. The choices he and his colleagues made included the usual suspects — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. But there’s also an odd little tune on the disc, recorded in 1927 by a Texan preacher and street-corner blues singer, Blind Willie Johnson. “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”, adapted from an 18th-century hymn, is wordless, consisting only of Johnson’s slide guitar and his resonant, gospely, moaning hum. The song was picked by Sagan, who said it concerns a situation Johnson — and humanity — faced many times: “Nightfall with no place to sleep”.

Perhaps AI will help with the data processing. A great problem to have would be so many probes gathering so much data that it sits in a memory bank in a usuable format but that no human had time to go through it all.

Of course, there isn’t much glory in that for PI’s. But it would allow for endless study and discovery in the future.

It further amazes me, and not in a good way, that we have only launched 1 more in all that time (New Horizons).