NASA Still has more Questions than Answers

One week after the space shuttle Columbia broke apart as it streaked over Texas just minutes from home, NASA still has more questions than answers. Searchers have recovered remains of all seven astronauts and more than 12 000 shards of metal, wires and debris that rained down across two states. But the findings so far have yielded few clues. The most significant discovery has been a 2-foot section of shuttle wing, including the carbon-covered leading edge designed to protect Columbia’s insulating tiles as the spacecraft heats to 3 000 degrees re-entering the atmosphere. If that section came from the troubled left wing, where temperatures surged in the shuttle’s final moments and sensors failed in rapid Omega Replica Watches sequence, it could provide hard evidence of what went wrong. Investigators hadn’t yet determined which wing the fragment belonged to, but should know “in relatively short order”.

In the shuttle’s final eight minutes the morning of Feb., temperatures surged in the left landing gear compartment, and the brake lines began overheating one by one. Sensors began showing overheating across other areas of the left wing and adjoining fuselage. Then Mission Control lost all contact and Columbia broke apart.

The 2 pound chunk of insulation, measuring 20 inches by 16 inches by 6 inches, broke off Columbia’s external fuel tank 81 seconds after liftoff and smacked into the left wing, where the sensors later failed during the shuttle’s return. Engineers studied the impact while Columbia was in orbit and concluded it posed no safety threat. Now they’re redoing their analyses, in excruciating detail, to see if they might have missed anything. Imagery experts are poring over a high-resolution photo taken by an Air Force telescope a minute or two before Columbia broke apart; some have suggested the leading edge of the left wing looks as if it could be damaged, and the photo shows a gray streak that could be a fiery plume trailing the wing.

Shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore acknowledges confusion, misinformation and “even some second-guessing on all of our parts” in the past week. NASA is no longer even certain exactly what time temperatures started to rise and sensors started to malfunction during Columbia’s final eight minutes of flight.

Meanwhile, NASA continues to gather evidence through an extensive debris search, centered primarily in Texas and Louisiana. There have been more than 350 reports of debris west of Texas — where NASA believes the most telling evidence will be found — but none of those reports had yet been confirmed to be from the shuttle. The Omega Seamaster Replica only thing ruled out, definitively and swiftly, is that Columbia was brought down by terrorists. With Israel’s first astronaut on board, terrorism had been the major concern for the shuttle’s launch and its return to Florida 16 days later. Federal officials said the shuttle was too high when it broke up — 207 135 feet — to be reached by any surface-to-air missile.