Posted on 02/01/2003 2:25:26 PM PST by socal_parrot
By John Antczak
ASSOCIATED PRESS
12:03 a.m., February 1, 2003
LOS ANGELES – Space shuttle Columbia appeared to begin trailing fiery debris as it passed over Eastern California early Saturday, well before its destruction over Texas, according to a California Institute of Technology astronomer who witnessed its fiery transit.
Anthony Beasley observed the shuttle's re-entry from outside his home in Bishop, Calif., near Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory, where he is project manager of the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy.
"As it tracked from west to east over the Owens Valley it was leaving a bright trail. As it actually moved over the valley there were a couple of flashes. ... Then we could see there were things clearly trailing the orbiter subsequent to that," Beasley said.
Beasley said he, his wife, Anne, and mother-in-law, Anne Finley, had gone outside in the early morning darkness to watch the re-entry from the small town 225 miles north of Los Angeles. He said the sky was clear and dark, and the shuttle was immediately visible when it cleared the Sierra Nevada peaks to the west of Bishop.
He said he had never witnessed a shuttle re-entry before and is not an authority on shuttles, but he immediately thought Columbia was having problems.
"In particular, there was one very clear event where there was a piece that backed off the orbiter. ... It was giving off its own light, then it slowly fell from visibility," he said.
Beasley said he thought the shuttle might be losing some of the heat-resistant tiles that protect it during the fiery re-entry. He said he did not learn of the shuttle's destruction until he went to the observatory and compared notes with two news photographers who had arranged to photograph the re-entry through a telescope.
Beasley said they compared notes and all agreed they had seen what he termed "the bright event, the third event."
"The analogy, I think, is it looked like the shuttle dropped a flare," he said.
He described the scene again: "Pretty soon after we started to see it track there were brief flashes of light. It would sort of flash a little bit and there was an indication of material trailing the orbiter. They would sort of disappear from view. ... That happened two or three times. One of these was very bright. It was a very clear thing. It separated itself from where the orbiter is. It sort of fell behind in the trail and it was burning itself. It was hot itself ... and then the orbiter continued heading toward Texas."
Keep NASA's feet to the fire!
TLBSHOW is often right and so are you and so am I.
Are you on the NASA damage control team?
Today's tragedy showed me that the feds are sometimes bumpling amateurs, not the omnipotent entity they want us to believe they are.
Today's TV coverage was overkill, to say the least. The networks preempted programming for too many hours to try to create this image of national tragedy. I look at it as the feds being incompetent and trying to control the news at the same time. I'm sorry those seven fine people died this morning it likely wasn't their fault.
Elevon.
For delta-wing vehicles, the ailerons (flaps on an airplane wing) and the elevators (flaps on the horizontal tail) are all on the trailing edge of the wing.
Elevon troubles could also result from a thermal failure -- burning wires, perhaps -- or there may have been a hardware failure in the elevon actuators.
The guy on CNN said they were burning the midnight oil, zeroing in on that section maybe. CAUTION: I am not up on the technical terms, but I believe this is what he was pointing to.
Again, this looks like the Shuttle, but there may be distortion.
This was over Dallas, just prior to the final breakup. The Dallas video seems to show that the Shuttle was traveling sideways at this point -- probably the beginning stages of tumbling -- in which case the vertical stabilizer would undubtedly have snapped off.
Agreed. Then again, it was taken with a professional-quality camera, and they're very good.
At any rate, in addition to actually being the Shuttle, the image looks like the Shuttle: it has all the right things in the right places, and even roughly the right colors. I tend to think that, because of a good lens, or a trick of the optical path, it is a true image of the vehicle.
MM
Yup.
The guy on CNN said they were burning the midnight oil, zeroing in on that section maybe. CAUTION: I am not up on the technical terms, but I believe this is what he was pointing to.
I distrust them on this. Yes, there may be elevon indications, but those might be a result of the real failure, which could have damaged the actuators.
Had the elevon survived, the Shuttle may have been able to land. Once the elevon is lost, however, the mission's over: the Shuttle is inherently unstable (as are most high performance aircraft), and relies on working computers and working control systems.
Once those controls stop working, the things probably not flyable anymore.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.