Space shuttle columbia lost

[theavonlady 2]

I'm starting to see newswires that Aviation Week reports that a US military ground camera took pictures of the Shuttle's descent, which clearly show damage to the left wing. Stay tuned.

[Balschoiw 0]

NASA now claims that "Space-wreckage" hit the Shuttle and caused the accident. Well, pollution kills, even in space.

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">At the Johnson Space Center Wednesday afternoon, Ron Dittemore, NASA's space shuttle program manager, said the engineering evaluation teams are sifting through Mission 107 flight data and examining accident evidence in a search for "something other" than the foam falling off the shuttle's orange external fuel tank 80 seconds after launch.

"It does not makes sense that a piece of (foam) debris caused the loss of Columbia and its crew," said Dittemore. "There has got to be another reason." He also dismissed the possibility that ice had formed on the shuttle or the external fuel tank and damaged the shuttle's tiles.

Since the accident, engineers redid their analysis on the effect of external tank insulation hitting the wing, doubling the estimated mass and velocity of the foam, Dittemore said. The model that NASA engineers used was conservative, intentionally leading to a worst-case answer. Yet, even at twice the speed and twice the weight, the foam could not have produced enough shuttle damage to lead to the disaster, Dittemore said.

NASA is still looking carefully at the role Columbia's left wing had in the accident. Dittemore reiterated that Columbia tried to compensate for increased drag on its left wing in the seconds prior to its breakup, firing steering jets on the right side. Engineers say data from the flight shows that the spacecraft was "falling behind" in its efforts to compensate for the increased drag.

Investigators also are looking at the shuttle's automated flight control system. "The flight control system was trying to overcome a disturbance, but it was loosing the battle," he said.

<span id='postcolor'>

[theavonlady 2]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Balschoiw @ Feb. 07 2003,14:28)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">NASA now claims that "Space-wreckage" hit the Shuttle and caused the accident. Well, pollution kills, even in space.<span id='postcolor'>

Got a link? I've only heard that as one of many possibilities.

From AP:

Meanwhile, a respected aerospace publication reported Friday that an Air Force tracking camera somewhere in the Southwest captured high-resolution images of Columbia, taken about a minute before the shuttle broke apart, showing serious structural damage to the left wing near the fuselage.

Aviation Week & Space Technology cited sources close to the investigation.

Lt. Kelly Jeter, a spokeswoman for Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, confirmed that the base turned over photographs to NASA.

"One of our telescopes got some shots of it going over," Jeter told The Associated Press late Thursday. She said NASA had instructed base officials not to comment further.

The base has a high-resolution telescope that photographs satellites orbiting Earth. The Starfire telescope can recognize features as small as one-foot long on a satellite 600 miles (965 kilometers) away, base officials say.

The Pentagon did not immediately return a call seeking comment early Friday.

[theavonlady 2]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Balschoiw @ Feb. 07 2003,14:28)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">NASA now claims that "Space-wreckage" hit the Shuttle<span id='postcolor'>

The article doesn't make any claims. It's theorizing. To get a factual glimpse of what space junk has knowingly caused in the past, read this article.

[theavonlady 2]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Balschoiw @ Feb. 07 2003,14:28)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">"It does not makes sense that a piece of (foam) debris caused the loss of Columbia and its crew," said Dittemore. "There has got to be another reason."<span id='postcolor'><span id='postcolor'>

Today, they're already retracting their retraction.

[Balschoiw 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Got a link? I've only heard that as one of many possibilities.

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A NASA official brought this to public yesterday. I´ve seen the interview. For sure it is only a speculation as everything is speculation but the foam can´t be the source of the crash if you check my edited post.

We will have to wait till investigations are finished. But it is known that space wreckage is a problem for nowadays satellites and spaceships.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/020513/020513-9.html

[theavonlady 2]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Renagade @ Feb. 07 2003,04:00)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">What about a self contained envoiroment propelled by the same engines on the deep space probes and a person in it <span id='postcolor'>

[Frizbee 0]

More pictures of the Columbia in its final minute have also revealed a long "Purple colored streak of lightning" which is a rare phenomenon that happens occassionally in the space clouds high above any normal thunderclouds.

This lightning bolt is striking the shuttle on the left side. NASA are investigating.

-From Australia's Sunday Mail.

[FSPilot 0]

[Bernadotte 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Bernadotte @ Feb. 04 2003,00:28)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (denoir @ Feb. 04 2003,00:o4)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I find it unbelievable that NASA doesn't have far better radars then that.<span id='postcolor'>

A good friend's dad works for NASA developing radar.  They launch needles into space and develop the means to track them.  The project name is: Haystack<span id='postcolor'>

They've been doing this for decades.  These days they know the low orbit of nearly every piece of metallic junk bigger than a ball-bearing.  It's rather tough to imagine that golfball-sized debris escaped their attention and ended up striking the same wing that got hit by foam, without alerting the crew.

[Warin 0]

Looks like the problem was in the left wheel well.

And it looks like NASA doesnt think the impact on launch would have been enough to cause the failure on its own.

Hopefully they manage to figure out exactly what went wrong. If it was a tragic sequence of events, not a design flaw, then the shuttles can get flying again.

[Winters 1]

Lost in all the war news is the fact that NASA has recovered Columbias Flight Data Recorder 2 days ago. Maybe we can get some more answers shortly.

[R. Gerschwarzenge 0]

That's nice to hear.

[Mister Frag 0]

In a strange coincidence, Columbia was the only shuttle equipped with such a recorder, because it was the oldest shuttle in the fleet, and originally had the recorder installed for the engineers to collect additional flight and system performance data.

[R. Gerschwarzenge 0]

Spooky.

Do you really mean that other shuttles don't have flight recorders?

[Warin 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (R. Gerschwarzenge @ Mar. 22 2003,09:28)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Spooky.

Do you really mean that other shuttles don't have flight recorders? <span id='postcolor'>

Thats exactly it.

Telemetry is constantly sent back to Houston and recorded, so flight recorders are not needed. And has been pointed out, even in an aircraft crash the flight recorders are often damaged beyond recovery... so imagine the astronomically lower odds of one survivng a shuttle accident.

[bn880 5]

Well it would appear that the report on what happened to that shuttle is in Report on NASA

I can say this is a very good outcome to seek the source of all the safety problems in the entire heriarchy of the agency. At least all the astronauts deaths were not completely in vein. However, there are thousands of similar safety problems all over North America just waiting for people to die before changes are made. It's all about money, what can I say, money over safety.

if this report is meant to cover anything up, it would have to be something very very disgusting as it already targets the whole culture... so it seems honest enough.

EDIT: Oh, and the specific cause of the shuttle loss was the foam insulation of the tanks hitting the leading edge structure of the wing, not actually the tiles, which was why everyone was wondering how that could have been deadly.

[theavonlady 2]

Forum rule:

§4)Do not dig up old threads

Threads older than 4 months should not be dug up unless something significant is being added.

It turns out there were survivors of the shuttle crash after all and it may provide clues for safer space travel in the future:

Quote[/b] ]Worms escaped fate of 'Columbia' astronauts

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

In what is believed to be a scientific precedent, living organisms that were aboard the Columbia space shuttle survived the spacecraft's breakup that killed the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, and his colleagues two years ago.

The creatures, hundreds of tiny worms, were on board as part of an experiment, and their survival points to inadequacies in search-and-rescue procedures and in crew survival systems.

These are the conclusions of a study by Nathaniel Szewczyk of the US National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Ames Research Center, and William McLamb of Bionetics Corporation, published in the latest issue of Wilderness & Environmental Medicine. The study is thought to be the first to report an animal surviving the atmospheric breakup of the spacecraft supporting it.

The worms, of the Caenorhabditis elegans species – a type famously used by Nobel Prize in Medicine winner Eric Kandel for research on memory – are considered to serve as a model system for biomedical research because they have nervous, muscular, digestive and reproductive systems. It was also hoped they would be useful for space life science research.

Reconstruction of the spacecraft's main body suggested that it broke up at a speed of Mach 19 and an altitude of 61 kilometers. Canisters housing the worms were released at between 42 and 32 kilometers. Researchers suspect that some of the spacecraft survived long enough into the breakup to protect the worms from some of the aerodynamic shear forces, frictional heat and shock waves associated with the deceleration and decomposition of the cabin, as well as the freezing temperatures of the upper atmosphere.

The recovered canisters were opened almost three months after Columbia's breakup. With a life cycle of between seven and 10 days, the live worms were several generations removed from those originally placed inside. The C. elegans experiment was designed to validate its in-orbit growth on a culture medium.

The canisters housing C. elegans acted as a sort of space suit, helping to protect the worms during the shuttle's breakup, impact with the Earth's surface and the interim between impact and examination.

The article's authors said they hoped the worm's survival would further the study of the human physiological ability to survive spaceflight and possible cabin breakup.

[Placebo 28]

On this occasion I think there's no point starting a new thread, better to resume this one

[Necromancer- 0]

Uhm...

Quote[/b] ]The article's authors said they hoped the worm's survival would further the study of the human physiological ability to survive spaceflight and possible cabin breakup.

You would have to convert the astronauts into worms?