UntitledWASHINGTON -- NASA officials confirmed Monday that a wing fragment found in Texas late last week came from the the left side of the space shuttle Columbia.
The left side is of particular interest to investigators because indications to date suggest that Columbia's problems began on that side of the vehicle.
The wing fragment is one of 12,000 pieces of Columbia that have been recovered to date and are being sent to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida via Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
Columbia's remains will be taken from the crash site -- an area spanning Texas and Louisiana -- to a large hanger at KSC were all the pieces will be consolidated and analyzed in depth.
Although there have been reports of debris as far west as California, NASA officials said that they have not recovered any confirmed Columbia debris any further west than Ft. Worth, Tex.
O'Keefe said the first shipments of Columbia debris left Barksdale on Monday. The first shipment of debris is expected to arrive at the space center on Wednesday, he said.
O'Keefe told reporters that NASA has formally handed off the investigation to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (AIB) led by Harold Gehman Jr., the retired Navy admiral who investigated the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
The AIB will operate out of Houston, Tex., O'Keefe said, and hold its first press briefing on Tuesday from Johnson Space Center.
O'Keefe said that although the AIB will be driving the release of information about the investigation, NASA will continue to update the media periodically.
He also promised to release the AIB's report as soon as NASA gets it. He said the report will be not examined or analyzed by NASA before its release.
O'Keefe also defended the independence of the AIB. He said NASA put into practice a contingency plan formulated post-Challenger and updated as recently as last September.
He said the contingency plan called for appointing someone outside the agency but with accident investigation experience to head up the board. The plan also called for a NASA center director from one of the agency's non-space flight centers,to serve on the board as well. NASA filled that position, he said, with the director of Ames Research Center, Scott Hubbard.
He said in the hours after Columbia broke up over Texas, he thought it best to move fast in appointing a board and getting it up and running "before the trail grew cold."
O'Keefe is likely to encounter questions about the board's independence when he goes before a joint Congressional hearing here on Wednesday morning.
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