Posted on 02/25/2003 5:06:19 PM PST by snopercod
SPACE CENTER, Houston - The board investigating the Columbia tragedy said Wednesday it wants to know more about a mysterious object that almost certainly fell off the shuttle and was flying alongside the spacecraft during its second day in orbit.
The object was never noticed during the flight itself; after the shuttle's destruction over Texas on Feb. 1, the U.S. Strategic Command began analyzing radar data that might shed light on the disaster and noticed the object.
Initially, NASA said it suspected the object might be frozen wastewater dumped overboard or an orbiting piece of space junk that the shuttle happened to encounter.
But on Wednesday, Air Force Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, a board member, discounted both possibilities and said the object almost had to have come from the shuttle itself.
"You or I could invent a dozen scenarios," Deal said. "It could have been something loose that separated, it could have been something inside the payload bay." It also could have been part of the left wing, where all of the overheating and other troubles developed during re-entry.
He described the object as about 1 foot by 1.3 feet in size and said it was flying in tandem with Columbia one day into the mission. It was within 50 feet of the shuttle and, within that first day, started separating farther and farther away until it burned up on re-entry three days later, he said.
"It's not like my friend Rick Husband rendezvoused with a piece in orbit," Deal said, referring to Columbia's commander. "It was something that more than likely came loose."
The composition of the object is unknown, but it was lightweight and not dense, Deal said.
Columbia had just gone through a major maneuver in orbit on Jan. 17, about 24 hours into its flight, when the object popped out of nowhere, Deal said. That suggests it could have broken loose from the shuttle during the maneuver.
Deal said that following the accident, the Strategic Command staff went through reams of data "I saw over 56 pages of just digital readouts" to track the object until its atmospheric re-entry on Jan. 20.
Because the astronauts did not do a spacewalk and did not have many windows, they would not have noticed the unidentified object, Deal said.
Meanwhile, a piece of a thermal tile, believed to be from the top of the left wing, remains the westernmost piece of debris found from Columbia yet and probably the earliest known fragment from its breakup.
The board's chairman, retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., said the tile fragment came from the upper surface of the left wing near the fuselage. It was found in West Texas, about 300 miles west of Fort Worth.
Gehman said at a news conference that he does not know how badly damaged that tile fragment is and stressed that it is too early to draw any conclusions from it. But he held up pictures of another tile fragment that was found about 30 miles west of Fort Worth; that piece was dark gray or almost black with orange specks, with extremely rough surfaces.
That heat damage is much more severe than what is normally seen from shuttle tiles, but engineers do not yet know whether that occurred during or after the breakup of Columbia, Gehman said. It is so badly damaged that investigators do not know what part of the shuttle it came from.
Gehman said tiles should be smooth and slightly smoky gray following a flight.
Both NASA and the investigation board believe any wreckage west of Texas could provide hard evidence about what was happening to Columbia as it descended on its way to a Florida landing. The shuttle was 16 minutes away from touchdown when it disintegrated over Texas, killing all seven astronauts.
The 10-member investigation board suspects the left wing was breached, allowing superheated gases to penetrate during re-entry. A central focus of the investigation is whether any of the debris from liftoff 16 days earlier caused or contributed to that breach.
And the fog settles.
And we need real-time analysis from the military radars and telescopes, not after-the-accident.
Something must be done, or my friend Ray will have the dubious honor of launching the last Shuttle.
NOW, the struggles of a Single Astronaut TRANSFIX the Entire Planet!!
We are Ready for OUR "NEXT STEP," ; we are ready to go Back to the MOON, & on to MARS & Beyond!
Doc
The sixteenth century media was far less sentimental ;-)
The sixteenth century media was far less sentimental ;-)
Speculation alert . . . (for clarity, I am speculating)
If this piece deorbited and burned up after only three days, that implies that parasitic drag may have affected it more than the more "massy" shuttle. It certainly had no "stationkeeping" capability and could not maintain its orbit. However, there are other possibilities than "not dense." For example, a thin-walled sheet or plate would be somewhat susceptible to parasitic drag, even if dense. It would have a low "ballistic coefficient" (which terminology we have discussed elsewhere).
Sounds like they know quite a bit about this mystery object. Its size, its orbit, its orbital decay, its re-entry . . . Wow.
Yeah, they know a lot . . .
I'm wracking my brain, but can't think of anything on the exterior of the shuttle that might come loose. Maybe some FRSI (pronounced FRIZZY) or something. The tiles are all stuck on individually, not in "sheets". Piece of RCC? Hell, that would have fallen off on ascent had is come loose.
Maybe they had a fluid leak of some kind? Doubtful something like that would have gone unnoticed by Houston. Besides, there aren't that many liquids on the shuttle outside the crew module. Hydraulic fluid, water from the fuel cells, lube oil...
As to the pages of digital data, their statement doesn't mean much to me. I used to look at hundreds of pages of raw digital (HEX) data in the shuttle program when we were looking for something particular in the data stream. At 128KBS, just a few seconds made for a large stack of fan-fold paper.
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