NASA: Shuttle Temperature Rose Suddenly

Yahoo News ^ | 2/2/03 | Paul Recer - AP

[NormsRevenge]

NASA: Shuttle Temperature Rose Suddenly

By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -

NASA (news - web sites) officials said Sunday that space shuttle Columbia experienced a sudden and extreme rise in temperature on the fuselage moments before the craft broke apart.

AP Photo

NASA space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said the temperature rise — 60 degrees over five minutes in the mid-fuselage — was followed by an increased sign of drag that caused the shuttle's computerized flight control system to try to make an adjustment to the flight pattern.

Dittemore cautioned that the evidence was still preliminary, but that one of the possibilities was that there been damage or a loss of thermal tiles that protect the shuttle from burning up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

"We are making progress," Dittemore said, adding that the combination of new engineering data and an observer who reported seeing debris from the shuttle while it was still passing over California may create "a path that may lead us to the cause."

The shuttle broke up shortly before landing Saturday, killing all seven astronauts. Most of its debris landed in eastern Texas and Louisiana.

Earlier Sunday, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe named a former Navy admiral to oversee an independent review of the accident, and said investigators initially would focus on whether a broken-off piece of insulation from the big external fuel tank caused damage to the shuttle during liftoff Jan. 16 that ultimately doomed the flight 16 days later.

"It's one of the areas we're looking at first, early, to make sure that the investigative team is concentrating on that theory," O'Keefe said.

The insulation is believed to have struck a section of the shuttle's left side.

Dittemore said the engineering data showed a temperature rise in the left wheel well of the shuttle about seven minutes before communication was lost with the spacecraft. One minute later, there was an even more significant temperature rise in the middle to left side of the fuselage.

The drag on the left wing began a short while later, causing the shuttle's automated flight system to start to make adjustments.

"There may be some significance to the wheel well. We've got some more detective work," Dittemore said.

The manufacturer of the fuel tank disclosed Sunday that NASA used an older version of the tank, which the space agency began phasing out in 2000. NASA's preflight press information stated the shuttle was using one of the newer super-lightweight fuel tanks.

Harry Wadsworth, a spokesman for Lockheed, the tank maker, said most shuttle launches use the "super-lightweight" tank and the older version is no longer made. Wadsworth said he did not know if there was a difference in how insulation was installed on the two types of tanks.

Wadsworth said the tank used aboard the Columbia mission was manufactured in November 2000 and delivered to NASA the next month. Only one more of the older tanks is left, he said.

O'Keefe emphasized that the space agency was being careful not to lock onto any one theory too soon. He vowed to "leave absolutely no stone unturned."

For a second day, searchers scoured forests and rural areas over 500 square miles of East Texas and western Louisiana for bits of metal, ceramic tile, computer chips and insulation from the shattered spacecraft.

State and federal officials, treating the investigation like a multi-county crime scene, were protecting the debris until it can be catalogued, carefully collected and then trucked to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

The effort to reconstruct what is left of Columbia into a rough outline of the shuttle will be tedious and painstaking.

When a shuttle piece was located this weekend, searchers left it in place until a precise global position satellite reading could be taken. Each shuttle part is numbered; NASA officials say experts hope to trace the falling path of each recovered piece.

The goal is to establish a sequence of how parts were ripped off Columbia as it endured the intense heat and pressure of the high-speed re-entry into the atmosphere.

At least 20 engineers from United Space Alliance, a key NASA contractor for the shuttle program, were dispatched to Barksdale for what is expected to be a round-the-clock investigation.

Other experts, including metallurgists and forensic medicine specialists, are expected to join the investigation. Their focus will be on a microscopic examination of debris and remains that could elicit clues such as how hot the metal became, how it twisted and which parts flew off first.

In addition to NASA's investigation, O'Keefe named an independent panel to be headed by retired Navy admiral Harold W. Gehman Jr., who previously helped investigate the 2000 terrorist attack on the USS Cole (news - web sites).

Gehman's panel will also examine the Columbia wreckage, and come to its own conclusions about what happened. O'Keefe described Gehman as "well-versed in understanding exactly how to look about the forensics in these cases and coming up with the causal effects of what could occur."

Joining Gehman on the commission are four other military officers and two federal aviation safety officials.

Officials used horses and four-wheel-drive vehicles to find and recover the shuttle pieces. Divers were being called in to search the floor of Toledo Bend Reservoir, on the Texas-Louisiana line, for a car-sized piece seen slamming into the water.

Some body parts from the seven-member astronaut crew have been recovered and are being sent to a military morgue in Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Columbia came apart 200,000 feet over Texas while it was streaking at more than 12,000 miles an hour toward the Kennedy Space Center (news - web sites). A long vapor trail across the sky marked the rain of debris.

[No Truce With Kings]

"The burning question which I cannot believe has not been asked. "If you knew for certain that due to tile damage that safe re-entry was not possible, what are the contingency plans for such a scenario?" There have to be solutions to save the crew that do not require repair of the vehicle."

Why? Sometimes you have to take risks. The tile damage was done after liftoff. After Main Engine Cut Off there was literally nothing NASA could do.

At that point only solution that would really work is to have a second Orbiter "hot" and ready to launch. Of course, the problem with the rescue Shuttle solution is that we have only one launch pad. That means we would have to put the rescue bird on then launch pad immediately after the first bird launched. This would only take -- oh a week. That is if you do not *check* the pad before loading the bird. Checking the launch pad out so that we could make sure that you can launch safely from it takes a minimum of two weeks.

And no, we cannot wait on-orbit three-four weeks because we are going to run out of onboard consumables. Those are budgeted at the mission length (no more than 14 days + 3 abort days. Nor can we rendezvous with the ISS. The Orbiter has maybe 1000 ft/sec of delta-V left once it is on orbit. It would have burned that up well before it even got in the same inclination as the ISS. There are words for this -- physically impossible.

As for a quick spacewalk, well the suits weigh an awful lot, and you need two. So you cut your payload dramatically carrying the suits (and suit consumables) you need for that quick look-see.

But lets say you waste the weight on the EVA equipment. You know those tiles are about as hard as styrofoam. Brittle, too. An astronaut swanning around near them has a good chance to break them. Wouldn't that be a trip?

Or lets say your inspection shows some tiles loose or mising. How do you replace them? Without damaging the adjacent tile, that is. You *are* aware that each tile is individually shaped, and most are *not* interchangable. I guess we have to fill up the middeck lockers with as many tiles as a linoleum store's showroom to ensure we have the right one. More cargo gone south. And now we need *two* spacewalks, one to diagnose the problem, one to fix it. Still more mass devoted to this contingency.

Ok. We have the right tile -- or tiles. We have figured out a way for a space-suited astronaut to ever so gently place the tile in the right spot. We can guarantee that the astronaut will not damage the adjacent tiles. (At this point even the ultimate improbability generator from Hitchhiker's guide is having a breakdown.) Whacha gonna attach it with -- that won't damage the tile? Know a good glue that works in a vaccuum at either +500 or -250 deg F? That's how the tiles go on.

How much of the science are you willing to sacrifice for this "rescue" capability? Because we have a lot of gear on board to protect against a situation that has proved fatal just once. That should not have happened if it were not for a combination of an ET tank design that is being phased out and insulation that was designed to be used with a later design.

Hello. Space flight is DANGEROUS. NASA had contingency plans to leave Buzz and Neil on the Moon to die, if the LM ascent stage failed. There was even one plan where a fix would require one guy to stay on the Moon and die so the other could live (a manual start of the ascent engine).

You cannot protect against every contingency, just do your best to guard against as many as you can. Replacing tiles onorbit is impossible, except in Space Opera. Having a rescue Shuttle isn't possible when we have just four Orbiters and one pad.

So don't get on Dittemore's case. He did the best he could with the cards he had in his hand. And not wasting time on a situation you cannot fix is a good call. The only realistic solution to flying without fatalities is to pull the plug on manned space travel, and spend the day in bed with the covers pulled over your head.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

I heard that the shuttle cost more in the neighborhood of 2 billion.

[Atlas Sneezed]

7. They did not have the consumables to stay in orbit until another Shuttle reached them (a minimum of 20 days). They had already been on-orbit for 16 days.

Why not start readying for rescue immediately after launch? Why not survive on limited oxygen with low activity levels, like A13?

Perhaps NASA needs an unmanned supply rocket to bring such necessities in this kind of event.

[July 4th]

If there is blame to attach it seems to be here. To the casual observer this is an astounding revelation. No EVA suits. No means to repair the heat shield. Amazing.

If you knew what a big deal/big pain in the a$$ it is to deal with the tiles on the ground, you'd understand why it couldn't be done in space.

[Lx]

I have a question for some of the aviation engineers I've seen post here.

On the broadcasts they're saying that when the computer detected increasing drag on the left wing, the right elerons (sp) tried to compensate.

At that altitude, I though normal control surfaces were useless.

So do they mean to say that the computers compensated by using the reaction control rockets? I think that's what they're called?

Since the telemetry data stream for the left side of the spacecraft gradually trickled down to zero, I'm not trying to imply that there was an explosion in the reaction systems if that's what they use at that altitude. I'm just curious in how they control the spacecraft at that point in descent

Many prayers for the astronauts and their families.

[Ramius]

Tethers are not expensive nor heavy. Not having enough to allow an astromaut to reach anything on the shuttle is not good planning.

In the early days of the shuttle they DID try to work out a way to survey and repair damages tiles. What they found was that it was not feasible. Part of the problem is that the surface of the tiles is quite fragile, actually. Imagine pumice stone. It's a ceramic that is quite porous and low density, like a ceramic styrofoam sheet that's the size of the roof on a house.

It survives heat nicely, but you can't bump an astronaut up against it without the risk of doing far more damage.

[VMI70]

"Their teathers do not extend that far...,"

I would be willing to bet that IF they had any idea that they were in danger, then they could have jury rigged something as was done on Apollo 13.

[sonofatpatcher2]

A very interesting shuttle tile is Here.

I can only post on Geocities and have little bandwidth to post, so perhaps someone can post it for me.

I inverted the photo on my computer and the writing reads:
V070-1911
-076 (or G) MN00

With these numbers, the tile should be traced to its exact location. It came from Kerens, Texas, 65 miles SE of Dallas and another tile is in Rice, Texas, 45 miles S of Dallas on I-45. If these tile came from under the left wing, that would place its failure at the top of the debris field.

[al baby]

Put a case of duct tape onboard

I know this is big time serious but im just so damm frustrated god bless the crew

[RossA]

If you knew you had a problem on the left-wing, there might be loads of possibilities.

The damage on Apollo XIII was completely unexpected - and they got the crew back. Who knows what they could have done here?

However, Mr. Dittemore would have had to give up his "anal" control and ask for help. Given his press conferences this weekend (and I admire his technological knowledge), that wasn't going to happen.

[6ppc]

THERMAL PROTECTION SYSTEM MODS

The area aft of the reinforced carbon-carbon nose cap to the nose landing gear doors has sustained damage (tile slumping) during flight operations from impact during ascent and overheating during re-entry. This area, which previously was covered with high-temperature reusable surface insulation tiles, will now be covered with reinforced carbon-carbon.

The low-temperature thermal protection system tiles on Columbia's midbody, payload bay doors and vertical tail were replaced with advanced flexible reusable surface insulation blankets.

Because of evidence of plasma flow on the lower wing trailing edge and elevon landing edge tiles (wing/elevon cove) at the outboard elevon tip and inboard elevon, the low-temperature tiles are being replaced with fibrous refractory composite insulation (FRCI-12) and high-temperature (HRSI-22) tiles along with gap fillers on Discovery and Atlantis. On Columbia only gap fillers are installed in this area.

[sneakypete]

NASA (news - web sites) officials said Sunday that space shuttle Columbia experienced a sudden and extreme rise in temperature on the fuselage moments before the craft broke apart.

If it took actual rocket scientists to come to this conclusion,they ain't making rocket scientists like they used to.

[Cboldt]

It's hard to ignore the ignoramuses, particularly as they are persistent. I have been taking note of certain screen names, and taken to read the name at the bottom of a post before I bother to read the post. Don't waste your energy trying to educate the folks who obviously don't take time to provide themselves with the basic education provided by the many threads already here.

You must feel simply awful, as a NASA insider -- more so that the rest of us. Prayers to you, and to the NASA family.

[HardStarboard]

Yesterday there was a link or a thread (I forget which) which took you to a blow-up slow-motion video of the Columbia launch, and the insallation hitting the wing and a white cloud of debris showering off the hit area. I think it was a CNN or Fox video (similar screen formats).

Can anyone give me a link back to that video - Its very graphic and in my mind does much to explain the final minutes of Columbia.

Thanks in advance for any help.....

[Cboldt]

Re: THERMAL PROTECTION SYSTEM MODS

Wow! What is the date and source of this? Great information, and both areas are potentially of interest (behind the leading edge of the door, and near the rear of the wing.

[_Jim]

If it took actual rocket scientists to come to this conclusion

You're reading a headline *not* written by a rocket scientist. This was the conclusion of the news people (their story, the story they would like to write) after *watching* the rocket scientists ...

[Kevin Curry]

Why, you're just a one one-man solution factory!

I vote we do away with the armies of quality control and contingency planning specialists employed by NASA and hire you alone. We'll save billions. Armed with just a notepad and your own native intelliegence you will totally prevent future shuttle mishaps and ensure that every astronaut will live to a ripe old age (unless they are hit by a bus in downtown LA; but then you can't be everywhere).

Hindsight experts are the most annoying experts of all.

[Interesting Times]

Bump for a potentially important post.

[js1138]

He RUNS away from the question of why he didn't ask for telescopic investigation of possbile left-wing damage on ascent - mainly because, IMO, he doesn't want to deal with the problem of what to do if damage is shown.

I'm sure others have posted this, but there simply isn't a survival plan for this. Perhaps there will be in the future.

[kylaka]

I agree. Had they had the materials to make a repair, they also could have orbited with the space station and let them make repairs. The whole "roll the dice" type planning with the heat shield tiles makes no sense.