on the functionality of precision-manufactured moving parts that are susceptible to damages caused by repetitive physical stress and foreign materials like dust and grime. Routine maintenance, calibrations, and cleaning operations can help extend the lifetime of many devices, but broken or failing parts will need repair or replacement: sourcing parts becomes more difficult and expensive as the supply stock for older machines reaches scarcity, and user technical skills grow challenged as newer machines and storage formats use less electromechanical parts and more integrated circuits and other complex components. Only a decade after the 1970s Viking program, NASA personnel discovered that much of the mission data stored on magnetic tapes, including over 3000 unprocessed images of the Martian surface transmitted by the two Viking probes, was inaccessible due to a multitude of factors. While in possession of indecipherable notes written by long-departed or deceased programmers, the computer hardware and source code needed to correctly run the decoding software had been replaced and disposed of by the agency. Information was eventually recovered after more than a year of reverse engineering how the raw data was encoded onto the tapes, which included consulting with the original engineers of the Viking landers’ cameras and imaging hardware. NASA experienced similar issues when attempting to recover and process images from 1960s lunar orbiter missions. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory acknowledged in 1990, following a one-year search that located a compatible data tape reader at a United States Air Force base, that a missing part might need rebuilt in-house if a replacement could not be sourced from computer salvage yards. Software Over the past several decades, there have been a number of various, once industry-standard file formats and application platforms for data, images, and text that have been repeatedly replaced and superseded by newer iterations of software formats and applications, often with increasingly greater degrees of incompatibility between each other and along their own product lines. Such incompatibilities now frequently extend to which version of the operating system is installed on the system (such as instances of Microsoft Works predating Version 4.5 being unable to run on the Windows 2000 operating system and beyond). One example of a developer cancelling an instance of planned obsolescence occurred in 2008, when Microsoft retracted intentions of an Office service package dropping support for a number of older file formats, due to the intensity of public outcry. Systemic obsolescence in