Archival performance of NASA GFSC digital magnetic tape

For most of the last decade, the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has accumulated data from scientific spacecraft at a rate of approximately 10 bits per year. This has resulted in an influx of instrumentation magnetic tape at a rate of approximately 2000 miles per week, and an efflux from the Center to experimenters of approximately 2000 partially filled reels of processed digital computer tape per week. The same data are archived in compact form, along with computer programs, orbit/attitude data and other related items. Scientific data tapes have now been accumulated in substantial quantities since 1958, along with tapes for manned and other spacecraft, and now constitute an archive of several hundred thousand reels of computer tape.