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NASA hopes wing piece holds clues Recovered fragment from shuttle's left side, focus of probe By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times, 2/11/2003
The wing fragment is regarded as the most valuable find in a painstaking hunt over hundreds of miles of territory, but a senior NASA official said it was still too early to tell how the piece would ultimately fit into the puzzle. ''Our own experts are having a difficult time determining what some of these objects are,'' said Michael Kostelnik, who oversees the space shuttle and space station programs. Hopes for another significant find were dashed yesterday. Early in the day, field investigators reported that they had located one of five ''general purpose computers'' responsible for flying the shuttle. But it turned out to be another type of wreckage. ''I don't have word yet on what it is,'' said NASA headquarters spokesman Al Feinberg.
The wing fragment includes about 2 feet of the wing's leading edge, which is covered by panels of a reinforced carbon material designed to withstand 3,000-degree temperatures. There is also about an 18-inch portion of the wing structure itself. Kostelnik said there was ''uncertainty among the people who recovered it'' about what part of the wing they were looking at. Investigators are keenly interested in the area near where the wing joined Columbia's fuselage, because during launch it was struck by a piece of insulating foam that broke away from the shuttle's external fuel tank. After the launch, NASA engineers studied films and made calculations, concluding that there might be some damage to the wing's heat-resistant tiles, but no risk of catastrophic failure. An Air Force photograph of the shuttle during reentry shows what some analysts believe to be a deformation in the leading edge of the left wing near where it joins the fuselage, as well as a plume of debris trailing behind it. But NASA officials are skeptical that damage during launch led to the disaster. Investigators have ruled nothing out, and NASA is also trying to find out whether Columbia could have been hit by a tiny meteorite during the flight, or whether frozen waste water from the shuttle could have caused damage in orbit. The piece of wing debris was found east of Corsicana, Texas, southeast of Dallas. NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said the agency was beginning to truck shuttle wreckage to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., where investigators hope to reassemble as much as they can in a hangar. A key milestone for the investigation could come tomorrow, when O'Keefe heads to Capitol Hill to testify before a joint hearing of the House and Senate committees that oversee NASA. If many lawmakers express skepticism about the independence of the probe, the Bush administration may be forced to revamp the Columbia investigative board, now composed of current and former government officials.
This story ran on page A2 of the Boston Globe on 2/11/2003.
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© Copyright 2003 New York Times Company |
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ASHINGTON -- A space shuttle fragment recovered last week has been identified as a piece of Columbia's left wing, where sensors recorded a series of temperature spikes and other failures moments before the craft disintegrated, NASA said yesterday.
