NASA's data is publicly accessible and while many excellent scientists work there they obviously don't have the time and resources (or incentives) to squeeze every last drop of data from legacy datasets. There is a huge difference between what one postdoc spending 400 hours tweaking the department matlab script can find, especially when 200 of those hours are spent writing the paper and pushing it through review and extreme software skills are genuinely scarce. Years ago I helped decode the Mars Viking GCMS raw data, which was uncharacteristically poorly documented. More recently I had a series of models replicate my results. To keep it interesting I initialized it without my results. Then once it had replicated my hard won work (in about 30 minutes) I instructed it to burn down the entire problem, pushing to the very limits of what the most sophisticated statistical methods can achieve. These are typically labor intensive and reserved for huge scientific collaborations like the LHC or LIGO. No-one is going to drop the equivalent of 100 postdoc years of effort on any legacy project. Then I had the model write it up and publish it. Then I had another model do the same thing for the Mars THEMIS data, placing hard upper bounds on current vulcanism and hot springs. This instrument had a negative result about 25 years ago so never (afaik) even published a paper. It's still negative but at least people can read about it now. Both analyses can be seen via projects.caseyhandmer.com I hope teams at NASA are currently feeding all our hard won legacy data through state of the art models, but if not (or and) any private citizen could do it today for maybe $1 of tokens per project.