Data shows Columbia was still fighting to maintain control in final seconds

SJ Mercury News ^ | 2/15/03

[NormsRevenge]

HOUSTON - New information from 32 seconds of garbled data show that shuttle Columbia's flight control system was still trying to guide the orbiter even after NASA lost contact with the ship, the agency said Saturday.

NASA has been working feverishly to resurrect information from the data, which Columbia continued to transmit after Mission Control lost contact with the seven-member crew on Feb. 1.

[NormsRevenge]

Much of the data may be too unreliable to be useful. But officials said today that they have retrieved enough credible information to determine that
two more jets were firing on Columbia's right side when Commander Rick Husband was cut off in mid-sentence ``Roger, uh''

NASA could not say precisely when the thrusters fired in that 32-second timeframe. But the new jets are different from two others -- located on
the right, rear of the vehicle -- that were known to be firing about 1 1/2 seconds before contact was lost at 8:59 a.m. EST while the ship soared
over Texas.

It's unclear what the new information means about the status of the crew in that 32-second period, and it does not shed light on what caused the
shuttle to break apart, killing astronauts Husband, William McCool, Mike Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and David Brown.

But the data show Columbia was fighting fiercely to maintain control in its final seconds

[Arkinsaw]

Good old Columbia. My thoughts were with the crew but I hated that it was her also. I remember that first flight and landing so well.

[MigrantOkie]

Same here...my first thought was "Not Columbia!"... Sorry...but she was a global treasure...Mankind's first reusable space craft.

[Squantos]

Embudito Canyon........BTTT !

Stay Safe !

[supercat]

Same here...my first thought was "Not Columbia!"... Sorry...but she was a global treasure...Mankind's first reusable space craft.

It would have been nice to have Columbia in a museum someplace after the end of its usable service life, and it is truly unfortunate that her crew were all killed; I'm not sure I'd call her a "global treasure".

Perhaps if our space program were more efficient I might feel a bit better, but the Shuttle was far from the most cost-effective means of doing most of the things it did. It did, to be sure, have one unique ability: the ability to bring down a larger payload than is possible via other means. I don't think that's what it was mostly used for, though.

To be sure, the shuttle is a reasonably effective general-purpose craft, but the Apollo missions demonstrated the proper means of space travel: specialized subcraft, each of minimum weight, which work together as a system. I think the Russians still use that principle; perhaps we could re-learn it from them.

[Dont Mention the War]

Same here...my first thought was "Not Columbia!"... Sorry...but she was a global treasure...Mankind's first reusable space craft.

Was the Enterprise technically usable? Or was it just a shell?

[Stefan Stackhouse]

There is a lot of pretty empty space between Albq. and DFW! Finding a needle in a haystack would be a much easier proposition, especially if equipped with a magnet.

[tophat9000]

Officials also identified one of the shuttle's main computers among the debris already taken to Kennedy Space Center, but the general purpose computer is badly damaged and missing its battery. It is not expected to provide any useful information, Herring said.

This is somewhat interesting and I'm not sure its true

I know that the shuttles computers in the past had used old style nonvolatile “core” (magnetic beads) memory because there no affect by radiation.

During the Challenger investigation they were able to recover the last moments of data in the recovered memory cards

[NormsRevenge]

core memory.. I remember it well... Univac UYK-5s