[null and void]

Didn't look like much of anything. Obviously fairly soft as it puffed into a cloud of frost(?) powder.

[eddie willers]

Obviously fairly soft as it puffed into a cloud of frost(?) powder.

Butterfly flap it's wings in Brazil....
Hurricane in India.

Chaos Theory.

[twyn1]

I dont't know -- this was extreme slo-mo -- pretty big chunk and even tho' it "puffed" it looked nasty, seemed to me that it hit the leading edge of the wing and then pulverized as it passed under the wing area, I wonder how many tiles it may have damaged as it went under there ??

[FReepaholic]

>>...Didn't look like much of anything. Obviously fairly soft as it puffed into a cloud of frost(?) powder....<<

Unless that "frost" was what was left of dozens of tiles.

[Jesse]

On this video, looks like more than one piece of debris. I have not heard that discussed.


At the altitude this happened, the shuttle must have been going how fast? 4-6 thousand miles an hour? Ever had a hailstone hit you on the head? Even relatively soft objects have a tremendous kinetic energy at that speed. KE=1/2MV2. So a ten pound piece of foam hitting one of those critical tiles on the leading edge of a wing could just split it like a crystal.

I think that this happened, and the tile was lost and the remaining tiles started to delaminate, and a hole burned into the wing...which would explain why they lost sensor data from the left wing.

[poindexter]

Or maybe some of that "puff" was pulverized tile. The stuff is not that strong mechanically.

[Atchafalaya]

My question also, was it foam or ice from the supercooled liquid fuel. I beleive the foam is a type of polyurethane; if that was a large chunk of ice then the damage may have been more significant. Speculation! I'm just so sad that this occurred. So close to home, but at the point of maximum stress and something let go. I remember Challenger, there was a Morton Thiokol engineer walking into the office and someone asked him what happened and he said that it was obvious that the shuttle fuel tank had failed and had blown up. Well as we all found out later it wasn't a fuel tank failure, it was a SRB joint/gasket failure that caused the incident. I'm sure the people at Michaud are devastated by this loss and are going over the records of that tank. When a catastrophe such as this occures a single quantifying reason is extremely rare. The expected scenario (if all tell the truth) is that there is a chain of events that lead up to the incident; that at if at any point that chain is intervened upon the incident doesn't occur. Let the chips fall where they may.

[null and void]

Didn't look like much of anything. Obviously fairly soft as it puffed into a cloud of frost(?) powder.

On the other hand, I'm the guy who thought Dale Ernhardt's crash didn't look that bad.

All I had to go on was the slowmo video on this thread, I din't realize from it that the shuttle was so far down range. I thought it was closer to the pad and slower.

I agree that the "frost cloud" could just as likely been ceramic powder.

[HardStarboard]

>>>Obviously fairly soft as it puffed into a cloud of frost(?) powder.<<<

That "cloud of frost(?)powder" may very well have been tiles themselves disintegrating. They are very fragile and porous ceramic (not like your kitchen tiles at all) and the insulation from the fuel tank hitting them could have very possibly damaged them.