Columbia shuttle lost Part II

[Mad Bomber]

Originally posted by Dissident
Yes we still have 3 more shuttles we can use to land on an Asteroid and drill and plant bomb if such a need arises like in the documentary Armageddon.

To Your Comments:


No disrespect intended to this tragedy, and my God have mercy on their souls.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Azazel
that puts things in a different perspective. You know this for a fact, andrew?

All of the shuttles are slightly different in design, and have unique configurations for each mission. STS-107 had a lot of onboard lab modules and other equipment specific to it's mission.

************

With the frenzy of speculation about the piece of ice or piece of foam insulation from the ET, one thing that hasn't been mentioned at all is the possibility that there was no significant damage from that event at all, and that Columbia was hit by something else at the time it started it's roll reversal and descent maneuver.

A micrometeorite encounter is a known risk, and so is the possibility of hitting space junk from thousands of dead objects in progressibely decaying orbits. We've had at least two known cases of satellites being killed by junk collisions, and have no ability to consistently track space junk smaller than 10cm in diameter.

The telescope footage taken by the Cal Tech astronomer showed that some object was already detached and moving with the Columbia, separate from the flash where another object (possibly an ablatement tile) detached. If the damage had been fatal from the outset (by the launch collision), I don't think it's real likely that Columbia would have successfully executed the roll reversal in the first place.

One way or another, the chances are pretty good that we'll find out.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Tolls
Even then, does the ISS have cameras that could resolve the STS wing sufficiently to make out damage?

Not unless the damage was so large as to likely be visible from the ground using ground based telescopes and adaptive optics. Privately owned amateur telescopes (standard commecial Meades and Celestrons) have been able to resolve lit components < 1 meter in size on both the shuttle and various space stations, and <20 cm resolutions have been obtained on Mir, Salyut and Skylab without adaptive optics, using larger scopes.

The ISS has nothing close to the ability to resolve individual tiles, most of which are black and very tightly jointed - there would have to be a big hole of missing tiles to be resolved - no alignment or cracking damage on a non-reflective black surface would be resolveable at all.

[Az]

With the frenzy of speculation about the piece of ice or piece of foam insulation from the ET, one thing that hasn't been mentioned at all is the possibility that there was no significant damage from that event at all, and that Columbia was hit by something else at the time it started it's roll reversal and descent maneuver.

A micrometeorite encounter is a known risk, and so is the possibility of hitting space junk from thousands of dead objects in progressibely decaying orbits. We've had at least two known cases of satellites being killed by junk collisions, and have no ability to consistently track space junk smaller than 10cm in diameter.

The telescope footage taken by the Cal Tech astronomer showed that some object was already detached and moving with the Columbia, separate from the flash where another object (possibly an ablatement tile) detached. If the damage had been fatal from the outset (by the launch collision), I don't think it's real likely that Columbia would have successfully executed the roll reversal in the first place.

two questions about space junk:
1) How are small part created? after all, a satellite, even when it malfunctions, is still staying intact?
2)why not just crash the sattelites into the atmosphere and burn them, when they go offline?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Small parts are created in a lot of ways - structural degredation from radiation, temperature differentials and micrometeorite collisions is the normal wear and tear way.

Another one is shear stress from the occasional satellite that doesn't deploy correctly or stabilize, so starts spinning uncontrollably and increasing stresses on things like joints for deploying solar panels.

Satellites can have stuff knocked loose or broken from the stress of launch, and that stuff gets deployed when the satellite does.

Also, large objects (Mir, Salyut, Skylab, and rocket booster stages) that reenter and burn up tend to break apart, and some small debris gets deflected upward (atmospheric bounce) back into orbit.

Accidents also contribute some - for example, problem with the solar panel arm not deploying on the original Skylab, and the French had a collision between a dead satellite and a military commsat, that broke pieces off of both.

There's several thousand pieces of junk > 10cm in size, tens of thousands in the 1-10 cm range, and likely millions in the < 1 cm range, down to microscopic particles.

Even though the junk would be a lot less massive than the ice or foam insulation from the ET, it could be moving at virtually any speed or angle, so the relative force of a collision with a piece of space junk or a micrometeorite would be higher.

Crashing satellites and burning them is done (now) with some satellites, depending on their orbital position, but is still not reliable - they could still have bounce problems with some pieces being separated and kicked back up, and you have a problem with trying to do something with an old satellite at the end of it's useful life. Do you take something in a relatively stable, out of the way orbit, and try to maneuver it into the atmosphere (passing through more crowded orbits, including those used in manned flight activities), not knowing if or how long it's maneuver systems (if any) will work? Sometimes it's been done successfully, other times it's done and hasn't worked. Sometimes, it's safer for several centuries to leave something where it is.

The earliest satellites had no really useful maneuvering systems, and/or uplinks can be impossible to achieve.

Yet another problem occurs with the percentage of satellites that just spontaneously die and don't respond.

Right now, the only thing that can be done is tracking those objects large enough to be tracked, and mapping the orbits that those pieces lie in or will soon be transitting through.

[The Mad Monk]

I was listening to an interview on the radio this morning, and they were saying (unofficially) that while there were no SOPs for checking the exterior of the shuttle, there were non-standard (aka risky) things that could have been done.

For example, an astronaut could suit up and go just outside the airlock, with a camera. The pilot would than carefully manuver the shuttle away from the free-floating spacewalker, and rotate the possible damaged section toward the space walker (who might well be rotating himself by this time). After enough pictures are gathered, the shuttle is manuvered back into position to pick up the astronaut.

I wouldn't want to be either the walker or the pilot.

[Zylka]

Originally posted by Willem


I really, really hope you're joking here!

You don't get out much, do you?

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Ned
I am still bothered by the fact that I woke up at 5:52, the very moment that the shuttle was directly overhead and began to break up. Could one of the crew reacted to whatever happened and I sensed his our her reaction? We will never know. But, this is more than strange.

Could it be...a coincidence?

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by Azazel
I thought you were all for tasteless jokes, Siro.

Where is your sporting spirit?

Please notice that you replied to Solver and not me.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

i think that 5.52 was too early for that. That would have been 7.52 CST which was a few minutes before it crashed. Failed sensors happens frequently and therefore there was no obvious problem yet.

[Ned]

On ABC's news site, there is an amateur home video of the last 20-30 seconds of Columbia's flight prior to its breaking up. The cameraman locates the shuttle in a clear blue sky, a tiny dot with no visible contrail. He initially focuses in tight on the shuttle. The shuttle can be seen flying at a yaw angle of about 30 degrees to the right, with the left side of the spacecraft facing into the wind. Both wings are clearly visible, and appear to be intact.

Just after the camera focuses in tightly, one begins to see fire trailing off the shuttle. The camera than zooms out so that the shuttle is again but a small dot. But the fire grows visibly. The contrail also grows. About 10 seconds after the fire begins, a large piece of the shuttle flies off in an explosion. One can definitely see a puff of smoke in the contrail as the piece of the shuttle flies off.

The fire now grows a lot worse. About 10 seconds later, other pieces began to break off and then the shuttle explodes into five or six pieces in a ball of flame.

What is peculiar about this is at NASA said that during its last moments the shuttle began compensating for drag on the left wing by steering to the right using its attitude rockets on the rear of the shuttle. The amateur camera video clearly shows that the shuttle is flying left side into the wind. Could it be possible that the shuttle itself compensated are overcompensated for drag by forcing the shuttle to fly sideways in the wind? Was the large piece it fell off the tail?

Is it possible that the steering maneuver itself was reacting to bad data coming from sensors that failed or about to fail on the left side of the shuttle? If this is the case, the NASA engineers were probably right in that the shuttle could have landed with the tile damage caused by the falling insulator debris. But what it couldn't survive was a sensor failure.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
i think that 5.52 was too early for that. That would have been 7.52 CST which was a few minutes before it crashed. Failed sensors happens frequently and therefore there was no obvious problem yet.

I live in California. 5:52 Pacific time is 7:52 Central.

Of course my waking up and looking at the clock to find out what time it was - because it was still pitch black outside - could have been a coincidence. But the timing is so immensely odd as to be bizzare.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Yeah i know, I made the conversion. 5.52 PST would have been 7.52 CST

[Boris Godunov]

Ned, you're strange. Very strange.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Ned, you're strange. Very strange.

Boris, It happened, that's all I know.