Motherboard did confirm the tapes were subsequently destroyed, however.

Many details from the investigation are still fuzzy, and the names of everyone involved, including that of the collector, have been redacted under privacy exemptions. 'Someone has a library of data from these missions.'

'With this many tapes, I'll bet they're not original. The labeled reels, however, could have been 'copies of copies of copies,' Keith Cowing, a former NASA space biologist and editor at NASA Watch, told me. (Back then, magnetic tape was an expensive recording medium, and it wasn't uncommon for NASA to overwrite reels as a cost-saving measure.) 'If you only have one tape of the data and it is eaten by a tape drive, demagnetized by some buffer, coffee spilled on it…you have no data, so it is common to make some backup copies,' Larry Kellogg, a former NASA systems engineer who worked with Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 equipment, told me.Īpproximately 215 reels were unlabeled, and NASA believes they may be blank, since labels were often removed before a tape was 'scratched' or reused. Copies were often made as backups, or for extracting data and working with the results.

Whether the tapes contain original or copied data is unclear.

Apollo space source:life grateful dead