Data from Columbia mission ending in disaster recovered...

[MultimediaMan]

Link.

Whoa... DOS, FAT16 and a 340 MB 5.25" HH Seagate SCSI Disk...that's pretty high tech... :P

The last time I handled a 340MB disk was over 10 years ago...

[cjolley]

Kind of amazing.

Two other drives had gone over their Curie Points though



PS Cool video about the Curie Point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8ZHQQUusGo

[Brian Ellis]

DOS is infinitely more reliable than Windows. I wouldn't mind betting that the computers used for this kind of experiment are 80386 with 80387 coprocessors: 486/7 at the very latest. Under DOS, they have a similar performance than a Core 2 Duo with Vista. Remember something else: the track width on a multi-platter 340 Mb HDD is probably 100 time more than on a modern 200 Gb one: this provides a kind of redundancy. I wouldn't mind betting that recovery, under those conditions, would have been impossible with a modern drive.

NASA, ESA, ISRO etc. have never been keen to update working systems simply because they exist; they believe in systems that been proven over decades.

[Nowhere]

Reliability is easy when thing beeing evaulated does hardly anything (seriously...after stripping everything possible out of Win install it will be quite reliable...and still doing much more). I think it's more of a case "don't fix what is not broken".

BTW, quick wiki search reveals that current spacecrafts (including Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) can use the power (no pun intented, seriously, it's more my lacking EN skills ) of...PowerPC G3, which has radiation hardened versions.