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Amateur Columbia disaster analyst alert! See my post #172.

NASA must go through every branch of the fault trees, must not assume anything, in order to find the root cause. That is the essence of a good root cause analysis. I trust these guys, they will do a good job. But hey, what can I say- in the end, it will be the foam.

Yes, having worked tediously through the branches of a fault tree analysis I agree the NASA will run each potential fault down in the course of being thorough.

Do you know that wiring, as it is heated to carbonization will change resistance in a way that can mimic a sensor rise? The effect is a reduction of the resistance of the insulation from infinity to a few ohms. Something to think about. In the end, the wires can short completely and because carbon is brittle, can also open. In a cable bundle, this effect can depend upon how deeply the heat has penetrated the bundle.

And yes, having a shock to the tile structure in the area that later propagates to failure, one must include the possibility that the events are related rather than coincidence. I believe NASA has proponants on both sides of this debate and that is good, because the correct answer may be examined more carefully in light of competitive theories.