NASA’s Impending Data Diaspora
Keith’s note: with regard to commercial solutions to missions being canceled, data archiving etc. – Nice idea. But actually this is a disaster in the making. With the rush to spontaneously cancel a wide swath of missions, there is no transition plan for data recovery or archiving in a structured fashion in place at NASA or by the Administration. It is all chaos. Data will be lost, mangled, parsed, and scattered. So unless dedicated people go out and buy a bunch of 10 TB drives and skirt government regulations and save it on their own, this will become a data diaspora. And thus the loss of these missions will be compounded by this scattered data. This has happened before and it is happening again. I have seen this happen at NASA with my own eyes. Not everything will end up nice and safe in GitHub. Embrace THIS Challenge.
4 responses to “NASA’s Impending Data Diaspora”
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24 TB are expensive but exist. You are gonna need at least 2 copies anyways. Count on a week to fill each drive.
This whole affair is disgusting and nothing about it will advance human knowledge or benefit our civilization. But I sincerely wish that there was a way, as a civilian space enthusiast and amateur science communicator, that I could help. I know there’s no way to make it happen before the impending crisis has come to pass, but perhaps in the future NASA could institute some sort of civilian science data program based around the p2p network model of file distribution. Where volunteers could sign up to download and store file sets, with multiple copies of each file stored and accessible on many individual computers in the event that recovery is needed. They could even encrypt the data stored in the “civilian cloud” so it can’t be read by volunteers. I’d buy a couple of TB of external drive space for that.
Data loss has already begun with people who left. The single point failure people were so overloaded with work for years that they had dozens too hundreds of reports to complete and data to summarize. That SME analysis is lost with the loss of those employees. The operations and oversight teams from Artemis I are not the same for Artemis II so there are already a lot of painful new lessons to learn.
My group has a nice Gitlab instance with all our stuff but yeah I imagine a lot will be left to the ether deep in deactivated account OneDrive no mans land..