I'm a fan of our space program here in the U.S.A., and it is one of the very few things that can excite patriotic fervor in me; I tend to look on nationalism as the fountain of all things stupid that aren't directly a result of religion in this world, but in this one little case I do give myself a little bit of leeway. Today, the Phoenix lander plopped its fat little ass down on Mars, and I got the itch to start farming the data for interesting tidbits. I've referenced NASA many times in the various Micronaut releases. Starting with Io, I got in the habit of mining the various NASA pages for data which I would endeavor to use in interesting ways. Many of the sounds on the various Micronaut albums are telemetry from various NASA missions imported in to Sound Forge as RAW, then carved in to interesting things. NASA also has a pretty vast well of sound files, if you know where to look, and these can be used as source data for various things. One nice feature of all the data that NASA puts out on a daily basis (and there is a metric fuckton of it, believe you me) is that it is all bought and paid for by the American public, and is thus public in its own right. You can use any of the raw data NASA puts up on its various sites without having to sweat copyright or get permission or any of that nonsense. (Some of the data is owned by universities, and some images are the result of private citizens or companies parsing the raw data in their own mechanisms, and these are copyrighted, so you do have to pay a bit of attention. The safe bet: if there's no copyright information on the page, it is free for all.) In any case, the easiest thing to do if you're grabbing raw telemetry data is to open in the editor of your choice as RAW. Finding the raw data for a particular mission can be kind of tricky, but trust me, it's all out there somewhere. That link is for some raw telemetry from the Galileo mission, for a blast from the past. The .PKT files are the raw packets. The vast majority of data from these deep space missions is imagery, but it will be in formats from 20-30 years ago, so it's not like opening a GIF or JPEG. Your mileage may vary. So, that's my general methodology, and sometimes it can provide useful results, with a bit of trial and error. Is there any funny source that you like to farm for interesting sounds?

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