![]() First, the tape does not appear to be in a continuous loop as it would in an 8-track cartridge. It’s clearly much more sophisticated than the standard 8-track cartridge transport for consumer use at the time. It appears that none of the non-flown DTRs exist in any museum collections anymore, and all we have is one picture of the mechanism. ![]() Playback topped out at a much slower 57.6 kbps, with 33.6, 21.6, and 7.2 kbps being options as well. The DTR could record at two different speeds – 115.2 kbps and 7.2 kbps. The specs show that the machine was a belt driven recorder that used a 1,076′ (328 m) long reel of 1/2″ (12.5 mm) wide magnetic tape which recorded data on eight separate tracks. The data tape recorder (DTR) system was subcontracted to Lockheed and manufactured by Odetics Corp. A NASA backgrounder on the Voyager missions shows that a data storage was specified that could buffer about 536 Mb, or the equivalent of 100 full-resolution photographs from the spacecraft’s camera. Voyager needed to save data and send it slowly back to earth. That would never cut it for Voyager, a much more extensive mission with a huge suite of scientific payloads, each of which generated far more data than could be instantaneously streamed. Commands from the ground and data back down had to be sent in real time. Those probes were extremely stripped down, at least as interplanetary spacecraft go, with no onboard data storage to speak of. The Pioneer missions were the basis for much of what NASA learned, culminating with Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes being sent to explore beyond the asteroid belt for the first time. That has been true for pretty much the entire history of space exploration and doubly so for manned missions the Apollo Guidance Computers of the late 1960s were built around resistor-transistor logic (RTL) chips for this reason, even after transistor-transistor (TTL) logic chips had been available for most of the decade.īy the time the Voyager mission’s Grand Tour of the Solar System was being planned in the 1970s, NASA had a fair bit of experience building space probes. Mitigating risk is a big part of the job of space exploration, and with the price for failure so high, only proven technologies are generally sent upstairs. ![]() Of course, there are plenty of reasons to send what would be counted as obsolete systems on Earth into space. While one team of alien researchers will be puzzling over why we’d encode images on a phonograph record, another team will be tearing apart – an 8-track tape recorder? Old School is Best School If aliens ever snag one of our interstellar envoys, like one of the Voyager spacecraft, they’ll see that we sent them some really old school stuff. We’ll take a huge leap forward by mimicking the alien technology the mind boggles. Just think of the fancy alloys, the advanced biomimetic thingamajigs, the poly-godknowswhat composites. Not only will it prove that we’re not alone, or more likely weren’t, depending on how long said probe has been traveling through space, but we’ll have a bonanza of super-cool new technology to analyze. On the outside chance that we ever encounter a space probe from an alien civilization, the degree to which the world will change cannot be overestimated.
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