'Major Systems Failure' Indicated

CNSNews.com ^ | 2-01-03

[hope]

'Major Systems Failure' Indicated">

'Major Systems Failure' Indicated
By Susan Jones and Scott Hogenson
CNSNews.com Staff
February 01, 2003

(CNSNews.com) - A senior government official says NASA's data shows a "major systems failure," CBS News reported Saturday afternoon.

Videotape showed a large piece of something coming off the orbiter immediately prior to its mid-air breakup over Texas Saturday morning. NASA reportedly is focusing on the space shuttle Columbia's left wing as the possible source of the catastrophic failure.

NASA said there is no indication that the breakup was caused by anything or anyone on the ground.

However, press reports noted that during the launch of the space shuttle Columbia 16 days ago, a piece of insulation came loose and appeared to hit the left wing of the shuttle. It's not clear what the extent of the damage may have been, if there was any damage at all.

Temperature stress on the shuttle is highest during the re-entry period. It was on re-entry that Mission Control lost communications with Columbia.

Space shuttles are protected from the heat of re-entry by an intricate system of heat tiles, according to Robert G. Melton, a professor of aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

According to Melton's research, "shuttle orbiters use a system of 30,000 tiles made of a silica compound that does not ablate, but does rapidly radiate heat away from the orbiter. These tiles can be repaired in space."

Melton's research notes that the "major disadvantages are fragility," among the heat tiles, which are "easily damaged before launch and by orbital debris; lots of tile damage due to debris since anti-satellite tests in mid-80s.

Another shortcoming of the tiles, according to Melton's research, is their complexity and the fact that "many people (are) needed to manually attach tiles to orbiter in a tedious and time-consuming process, and to inspect them all before launch."

Melton's research indicates that during the re-entry period, maximum temperatures are recorded at an altitude of 40 miles with a speed of 15,000 miles per hour.

It is also during this time that communications are routinely disrupted because of ionization, which is caused by the high temperatures and "creates an impenetrable barrier to radio signals," according to Melton's research.

According to NASA, contact with Columbia was lost when the shuttle was flying at roughly 200,000 feet at a speed of more than 12,000 miles per hour.

 

[fuente]

With reguard to the plume, this is not necessarily true. You might be right in this case, but often the plume is seen when the gases cool in the surrounding atmosphere after the vessle has passed. So if you get too close, the vapor trail will not be visable within the picture. Just depends on the atmospheric conditions.

[WFTR]

The evidence has been scattered over two states and even if we found every last bit, it still may not answer the question, 'what happened'.

To make matters worse, evidence of most metals failure may have burned. In analyzing common failures in industry, we look at the fracture surface. I doubt that any fracture surfaces survived the fall. We also look at the microstructure of the metal, but the heat will have changed the microstructures from what they were before the crash. Finding answers will be a long, hard job for the folks at NASA.

WFTR
Bill

[finnman69]

No way is this a close up of the space shuttle....wrong shape. 'Tail' is way to wide proportionally to the width of the main fuselage.

Camera distortion from the camera iris..

Camera iris.

Check out this thread

[NJJ]

Another possibility for the failure (not the Orbiter traveling sideways) is that there may have been a seal failure in the left landing gear doors. I'm not sure if these doors are double sealed but a leak here could raise temperatures sufficiently to initiate a structural failure in the wing and would account for the last warnings to the crew about the left tire temperature/pressure(?).

The bad part about this scenario is that it opens the door(?) to possibilities for sabatoge/terrorism. I would assume that NASA was quite aware of these possibilities and would have take precautions. The landing gear doors would have been closed and sealed from before launch so they could have been tested for pressure but maybe not for a thermal integrity.

[_Jim]

I was distracted and might not have that exact

You got it right.

I was wondering, too, why they didn't 'send it back' right away, but, it may have been an actual film camera they used instead of a "space-qualified Sony Mavica" ...

[_Jim]

The bad part about this scenario is that it opens the door(?) to possibilities for sabatoge/terrorism.

Nice idea BUT they experienced failures of the temp sensors for the hydraulics that work the elevons first ... and the temp indications in the wheel well (for the brake lines), and tire pressure sensors *were* working at that point ...

So, no cigar ...

[r9etb]

This is some very interesting information. I'm thinking we may not see a shuttle launch for awhile.

Those cracks were in the connection between the Shuttle and the external tank. They were fixed, and anyway, would not have had any bearing on this failure.

[_Jim]

It's becoming obvious that a lot of these people have never worked a good TTL (through the lens) viewer, SLR (single lens reflex) camera ... and experienced the wide range of *distortions*/anomolies that can be seen while looking at various scenes and occasionally getting out-of-focus images ...

I guess it's a learned talent or skill - being able to quickly separate a camera anomoly from a real, bona-fide image ... it *also* helps to view the highest quality full motion picture video available - and not a lot of this 'reconstituted' MPEG and RealVideo stuff that often employ 'lossy compression' techniques ...

[_Jim]

Justa may have caught on to something that could lead to an eventual explanation of the breakup and destruction of Columbia.

This has been been rather thoroughly trashed as a viable theory ...

[r9etb]

I think you're getting something confused here. Most shuttle launches are videotaped by military aircraft flying at high altitudes to record the orbiter as high as possible.... Nobody who videotaped that launch from the ground would have been able to get that kind of magnification, and the Challenger was "only" 48,000 feet up (as opposed to 200,000+) when it was lost.

Actually, those shots were and are from ground-based cameras. Aircraft cameras cannot be as large, and are too prone to turbulence to be a reliable video source.

FWIW, I once saw some video of the Shuttle in orbit, shot from a ground-based camera. From a slant range of hundreds of nautical miles you could see the shapes of the larger equipment in the payload, the windows, and IIRC even the OMS pods. (At the time, the capabilities of that particular camera were classified -- I heard that the guy who hooked the shots into NASA Select TV got canned....)

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

A senior government official says

Bullsplatter what official goofball would say anything conclusivly without investigation?

More apeasment[sp] of the masses through SPIN !

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

Robert G. Melton

received his B.S. in physics (cum laude) from Wake Forest University in 1976, his M.S. in Physics (1979) and Ph.D. in Engineering Physics (1982) from the University of Virginia. He joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Penn State as an Assistant Professor in 1981, and became Associate Professor in 1987. Professor Melton has taught undergraduate courses in orbital mechanics and attitude control, spacecraft design, space science and technology that is intended for non-technical audiences; his graduate courses include astrodynamics, aerospace vehicle dynamics and control, and advanced spacecraft dynamics. His professional research includes work in celestial mechanics, non-Keplerian astrodynamics, trajectory optimization, and optimum station keeping for space-base interferometry, and satellite attitude dynamics and control. Beginning in 2003, he will assist in supervising undergraduate student involvement in the operational control of the Swift gamma-ray burst detector spacecraft. Presently, he is an associate editor of the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics

[Slyfox]

"These tiles can be repaired in space."

I was watching the NASA press conference today and the question about repairing tiles came up. They said it was impossible to do in space. They can not replace missing tiles. For some reason they could not do a space walk and check out the damage.

[r9etb]

No way is this a close up of the space shuttle....wrong shape. 'Tail' is way to wide proportionally to the width of the main fuselage.

I disagree. The entire image is certainly distorted "wide," but this does indeed look like it's the body of the Shuttle, seen from behind.

The darker rectangle, right in the middle, looks to be the body flap. The rounded area at the bottom is the nose, and of course the grayish triangular shape below the white blob would be the wings-to-nose, as seen from below. The black spots on the white "side bulges" look to be the OMS nozzles.

It's worth noting that the "body flap" looks broken on the right hand side.

The vehicle does seem to be traveling sideways at this point, as the "smoke" is trailing off to the right. If this is truly the case, then it would not be at all surprising for the tail to have come off by this point.

The main engines are not visible here -- either they're white-hot, gone, or simply obscured by plasma. They my have been torn off at or about the same time as the tail.

At this point there doesn't seem to be any obvious damage to the left wing, but it does appear to be "shorter." This could be an optical trick.

I think this particular video is going to be enhanced to the hilt, and eventually they may be able to spot something with it.

Personally, though, I think they're going to get most of their answers from telemetry.

[morkfork]

I can buy your explanation on the tail section shearing off due to maximum stress but wonder if this is secondary due to a disturbance in control due to the left wing sensor failures. I would put money that the tail sheared off, but was it the contributing failure mode is the question.

My gut feeling is that some point thermal event in the left wing cascaded into catastrophic failure. Any more than that I can't surmise.

Oh, I'm an engineer/physicist too (optical not aeronautical and still actually have a job) but who cares about titles and jobs anyway. :)

[Richard Kimball]

I know next to nothing about space flight, but have been wondering about a couple of things.

First, I know that spacecraft must reach an escape velocity to exceed the force of gravity after it rises above the height at which the atmosphere is dense enough to give the craft ability to push against it.

This leads me to two questions, also posed to any other Freepers.

1. Why do we use rockets to launch spacecraft? I know that the Air Force, back in the sixties, was using planes to carry test ships up, and that at least one of these test ships went above the atmospheric boundary. Use of large planes to piggyback the spacecraft to higher altitudes seems like a much safer, if less spectacular alternative.

2. Why does the shuttle come in at such a high rate of speed? This seems excessively risky to me, and I don't understand the reasoning for it.

The two risks of bouncing off the atmosphere and burning up on re-entry both seem related to the speed of re-entry. A rock doesn't skip off a pond because of the inherent density of the water, but because the speed and angle of approach does not allow the water sufficient time to displace itself for the mass of the rock. The speed of re-entry seems unneccesary. Firing reverse thrusters prior to atmospheric re-entry seems to me like it would make re-entry much safer.

I know there must be a good reason for this, as the people at NASA are a lot smarter and more knowlegable than I am, but it seems to me that a slower re-entry would be far safer, and still allow the shuttle to enter the atmosphere.

A third and unrelated question is why don't we replace the current shuttles? I know cost is a huge issue, but many of these craft are twenty-five to thirty years old. Even though they have been renovated, the metal fatigue and changes in understanding of aerodynamics has made the current fleet obsolete. There are few 1970's era cars still on the road. The reason is that even with repair and renovation, they eventually become obsolete. It's time to move forward, in my opinion, to the next generation of space craft.

[r9etb]

1. Why do we use rockets to launch spacecraft?

You've got to use something to get from zero to 25,400 feet/sec, and rockets work damned well -- especially if you're putting big stuff into orbit. The advantage of rockets is that you can stage them -- drop off the parts you don't need once you're done with them. To do the same with a "space plane" means you're going to launch 250,000 lb into orbit, and bring 200,000 lb of it back to Earth. (This is what the Shuttle does....)

2. Why does the shuttle come in at such a high rate of speed? This seems excessively risky to me, and I don't understand the reasoning for it.

Look at it this way: to slow the satellite down from 25,400 fps to a "reasonable" speed of 5280 fps would require about 170,000 lb of propellant -- roughly the weight of the Shuttle itself. It would be ruinously expensive to launch that much propellant into space merely for re-entry. So they use the atmospheric drag instead. The deorbit burn uses a relatively modest 9800 lb of propellant, to bring the Shuttle into the "thick" air.

[finnman69]

Sorry, I am right

Even if the image was distorted wide why would the proportion of the width of the fuselage to the wingspan change? It would not. If this is in fact was a closeup view of the orbiter, the high magnification and narrow field of vision would render the image very flat and non-distorted(as opposed to a wide angle lens). In that case, the proportion of the fuselage to the wingspan would remain the same. In the supposed closeup the 'ears'of the engines containing the smaller engines appear at a point halfway between the wingtip and the centerline of the aircraft. In reality they are at the inner 1/3rd point from the centerline. . What you calling the body flap appears to be 1/2 the total length of the image. In reality the body flap is less than a third the width of the total wingspan. And if the tail had broken off, there is no way this thing would not be tumbling out of control at that speed. This image and footage appears to be stable

This is NOT a closeup clear image of the shuttle. It's an optical distortion that happens to be similiar to the shape of the shuttle.