Poor Storage Ruining NASA Data, Report Says : Science: The GAO charges irreplaceable tapes may be damaged beyond repair. Space agency officials strongly dispute the findings.
Hundreds of thousands of magnetic tapes containing irreplaceable scientific data from American space missions are deteriorating--and perhaps damaged beyond repair--because of improper storage and management, the General Accounting Office said Friday.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has stored at least 1.2 million reels of information beeped back to Earth from orbiting satellites and lunar and planetary probes during the 32-year history of the American space program, the GAO reported.
Yet NASA “does not have an agency-wide inventory of its data” and “does not know what is being retained and where it is located,” endangering critical information that could be vital to future scientific ventures, the GAO investigators charged.
In a report prepared for the House Space, Science and Technology Committee, the federal auditing agency said eight of 10 storage and processing facilities it inspected failed to fully satisfy the accepted regulations for storing such material.
Five of the facilities were in compliance with fewer than half of the government and industry archival guidelines, the GAO said.
NASA sharply disputed the major findings contained in the 76-page document, challenging the GAO’s assertion that it has failed to protect space-science data as a national resource for future generations.
John E. O’Brien, NASA assistant deputy administrator, said in a letter printed along with the GAO findings that the report was “unnecessarily harsh, and contains sweeping generalizations and extrapolations which we believe to be unfounded and unsubstantiated.”
Specifically, O’Brien said NASA could find no evidence that important data has been lost as a result of mismanagement. And he said that all of the recommendations offered by the GAO already were being addressed.
The report was issued as NASA prepares to go to Congress for the first major funding of new space programs, which will produce a flow of information dwarfing the output of satellites and deep-space payloads launched in the past.
The report cited as an example the planned Earth Observation System, which would gather data needed to accurately forecast the effects of global warming.
If deployed as now recommended by the space agency, the system would generate a volume of data equivalent to all the books in the Library of Congress every six weeks, the GAO said. One of its orbiting platforms, loaded with a dozen scientific instruments, would transmit a trillion bits of data per day, enough to fill 700 high-density magnetic tapes.
Members of Congress who are seeking data needed for computer models of global climate behavior have taken new interest in finding out how much and what kind of information the space agency already has collected.
“NASA’s data management has been one of its weakest features,” said Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), chairman of a Senate subcommittee on science, technology and space. “We’ve been trying for months to complete an inventory of exactly what they have, where it is, and how it can be accessed. It has been an eye-opening experience.”
The GAO investigators reported finding space-research data in storage facilities that failed to meet criteria for temperature and humidity control, fire and water protection and tape maintenance.
More important, the report said, some of the most significant tape-management deficiencies were found in the two largest facilities responsible for managing irreplaceable data: the National Space Science Data Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and a U.S. Geological Survey facility in Sioux Falls, S.D.
The GAO report noted that officials at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which controls the United States’ planetary space missions, have determined that important data has been lost through faulty storage and management.
JPL officials “with substantial experience and expertise” estimated that half of the 130,000 tapes the laboratory had stored at the Los Angeles Federal Records Center at Laguna Niguel “may be damaged beyond recovery or contain data of little or no value,” the GAO said.
“This evidence, combined with the serious physical storage conditions . . . substantiates our concern that NASA’s space-science data stored on magnetic tapes are at serious risk of becoming partially or completely unusable,” the report said.
Concern about deterioration of data gathered by the Voyager, Viking and Mariner spacecraft led JPL officials to copy 12,500 reels of tape in 1983 to preserve priceless information gathered from the planets of Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. The $495,000 project showed that efforts to restore 10-year-old tapes often led to their destruction.
NASA is now experimenting with the use of optical disks as a replacement for magnetic tapes.
At Goddard Space Flight Center, 10,000 tapes of satellite data have been stored on just 243 disks, but the GAO report said it is too early to tell whether improvements offered by that technology address the myriad problems of data storage, preservation and dissemination.
While the report primarily blamed NASA for the “deplorable conditions” under which the scientific data is stored and maintained, it said the General Services Administration and the National Archives and Records Administration also share responsibility.
