NASA investigates debris found in Nevada as search widens

By Adam Goldman, Associated Press, 2/24/2003

AS VEGAS - Teams searching for parts shed by the space shuttle Columbia as it broke apart found more small metal fragments yesterday in a rural part of southeast Nevada.

Digital photographs of the material were sent to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for analysis. Several scraps of aluminum also were found Saturday.

NASA has not confirmed whether any debris west of Texas came from the shuttle.

Casey Wood, who was sent by NASA to aid in the search, said he was ''80 percent sure the items'' were from Columbia. Wood is an employee of a NASA contractor, United Space Alliance in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The search of about 30 square miles near Panaca, about 170 miles north of Las Vegas, began Friday and was expected to conclude today. NASA requested yesterday that the search be expanded about 35 miles west of Panaca, search officials said.

A NASA official had told searchers that the hilly, sagebrush-covered desert near the Nevada-Utah state line could contain a 6-foot chunk of the shuttle's landing gear, said Bob Williams, a sheriff's volunteer and a spokesman for the Nevada search effort.

Finding the landing gear could give investigators important clues about why the shuttle broke apart Feb. 1. The board investigating the accident has determined that Columbia almost certainly suffered a breach along its wing and possibly its main landing gear compartment that allowed searing air to blast inside during its reentry at almost 12,500 mph.

The search teams turned up several metal scraps. Major Garret Coleman, of the Nevada Wing Civil Air Patrol, said some of the pieces he saw ranged from 1 to 4 inches long.

''It looks like tin foil with a fibrous material attached to it,'' he said. ''It's not charred, but there is some darkness to it that looks like it was exposed to some heat.''

About 80 miles from Panaca in Utah, officials also were searching at NASA's request in the Kolob Mountain area near Zion National Park, said Washington County Sheriff Kirk Smith.

''None of the stuff I've seen looks to me like something that would have been on the shuttle,'' Smith said.

In Washington, D.C., yesterday, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said an independent panel will decide the significance of e-mails by a NASA research engineer warning two days before Columbia broke apart that damage to the shuttle's insulating tiles might have left it in ''marginal'' condition.

''I'm going to live by that judgment from that independent group to tell us exactly what we could have, should have, might have, would have done had we known something differently,'' O'Keefe said on CNN's ''Late Edition.''

But O'Keefe insisted the e-mail discussions of the spacecraft were not unusual.

''Those are the kinds of dialogues and debates that go on every single time, during every single mission,'' he said.

''We want to encourage that kind of dialogue and are looking at releasing everything and anything we can find in order to get the maximum evidence and facts together.''

This story ran on page A3 of the Boston Globe on 2/24/2003.
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