Big data in 1981
October 7th, 2017 at 3:36 pm (History, Spacecraft)
Browsing the JPL archives, I came across this image from 1981 for the Voyager 2 mission’s encounter with Saturn. It was designed to illustrate how Voyager 2 would be sending back soooooo much data – look how many books it makes! (Click to enlarge)
![Voyager 2 data](https://www.wkiri.com/today/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/voyager-data-1981.jpg)
Image credit: JPL Photolab, 1981.
I love that in 1981, the artists measured data in terms of books :) Not many people had their own computers or would have understood a discussion of disks or files or bits or bytes, so this was the perfect visualization. Even today, I find it more charming and tangible than most “big data” graphics I’ve encountered.
Cassini has, rightfully, gotten a lot of press lately for its gorgeous images of Saturn, but Voyager 2 was there first and captured its own beauties, like this one:
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/Saturn_%28planet%29_large.jpg/387px-Saturn_%28planet%29_large.jpg)