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."
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