Sister System steered the group’s perspective towards the capsule, so closely that they could see individual rivets and the capsule’s paint job, with informative labels, all in the Cyrillic alphabet. Sister hovered the virtual camera,
Frances was skeptical. “Aren’t there programs for tracking orbital debris? How can a hundred year old satellite escape detection?”
“The short answer is, there are, and it didn’t. It was cataloged in ‘07 and again, to higher precision, about forty years later. Its orbit is in the electromagnetic heart of the Inner Belt, a ‘no-go’ zone. And the thing is small and compact. The deorbiting programs will get to it eventually, but there’s other fish to fry first.”
“I wonder what’s in it?” mused Bender.
“KENGURU was launched as an offshoot of the Sputnik program sometime in 1958. These were the very first satellites of human making. They carried scientific instrumentation only, and transmitted only scientific telemetry. The Soviets didn’t yet have a global network of ground stations providing coverage of the whole sky. The satellites had tape recorders to record data for later transmission, but these failed more often than not, at least in the early days.”
“Especially in a high radiation environment,” murmured Merle.
“Yes, and fields that strong are certainly capable of erasing magnetic tape before it’s read out, even if the recorder is in good working order.”
Bender had a question. “If the Soviets knew tape recorders didn’t work, what there a workaround? Some means of recording data that wouldn’t be susceptable to erasure? I’m thinking of the Voyager photographs.”
“Go on.”
“The Voyagers didn’t have enough memory to store digital images, so they used wet-lab photography. The cameras used ordinary photographic film, developed using chemicals onboard the spacecraft in an robotic darkroom. Then the photos were scanned and transmitted, pixel by pixel, back to Earth. The original negatives are still out there, in interstellar space. Imagine finding that picture roll on an alien beach in a hundred thousand years!”
The engineer tsk’ed. “The early Sputniks were way more primitive than Voyager. No cameras at all, that we know of.”
“I’m not talking about photos. You can record other things on film. My grandmother had an old movie projector she rescued from a junk pile at college. She had a small stack of movies, of wind tunnel tests, with sound narration. I used to project the movies on the wall of her living room, with the lights out. Anyway, if you held the film in your hands, you see a narrow strip next to the frames, a pattern of wider and narrow clear bands across a black background. Grandmother explained that that was the soundtrack, optically encoded.”
“Yes… yes, that would work, in principle. You could enode binary data that way pretty easily. But you lose an advantage afforded by magnetic tape, which is its reusability. The Sputnik 3 design reused an endless loop of tape to record and send each orbit’s data. Film isn’t reusable. It’s forever. The very thing that makes it superior to tape on the one hand, makes it useless, on the other.