Magnetic Tape Recording

NASA's contribution to tape recorder technology may appear to lie in such glamorous devices as the tape recorders of the Tiros and Nimbus satellites which receive signals carrying weather information during an orbit around the earth and then transmit those signals back to the ground when the satellite is in view of ground stations. These quite important recording devices are, however, only useful as members of a complex hierarchy of devices all of which participate in the ultimate process of obtaining information from NASA's efforts. Their existence and utility is based on the existence of many more prosaic recording devices which have been involved in the development of such spectacular units.