First posted February 25, 2003, 6:23 p.m.
HOUSTON -- -- The Columbia Accident Investigation Board continues to methodically work through thousands of potential reasons why the shuttle broke up over Texas on Feb. 1 and there is no end in sight.
"Our commitment and resolve to get to the bottom of this is undiminished," the board's chairman, retired Navy Admiral Harold Gehman, said Tuesday at a weekly news conference.
However, although there was no frustration in his tone, he later told SPACE.com, "I wish we had found the cause by now."
Although it won't help in determining the cause, NASA confirmed late Tuesday that the agency has recovered a segment of videotape shot by the crew during the early stage of re-entry, before things started going bad.
Twenty-four days after the tragedy claimed the lives of astronauts Rick Husband, Willie McCool, David Brown, Mike Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, Ilan Ramon and Clark, neither the Columbia board nor NASA has ruled out any potential cause.
That wasn't the scenario following the 1986 Challenger disaster at this same number of days following the mishap, Gehman said.
"At this time in the Challenger investigation, they already knew what did it. And they were busy going around finding out whether or not the NASA people had done all the things they were supposed to do to prevent it," Gehman said.
With still plenty of more analysis and debris to recover and study, the timing of the board's final report remains anyone's guess.
But if the board determines a specific cause that NASA and its contractors can begin working on a fix, Gehman said they will immediately announce that, "at the same time advising NASA that's not the end of the story, there's a lot more to go."
To that end, the hunt for more debris continues.
As of Tuesday the board reported that 8,100 pieces of debris had been retrieved, of which 5,297 had been identified. That number by weight represents about 10 percent of the 100-ton spaceplane.
Slowly but surely the debris trail is extending farther west, with a small heat protection tile fragment confirmed found near Littlefield, Texas, about 330 miles west of Dallas.
Another thermal tile, found just 30 miles west of Ft. Worth, Texas, has been identified as coming from Columbia's left wing. It shows extreme heat damage on its outside surface, and the side that was glued to the orbiter's wing is missing a chunk of material.
Board members said the tile was interesting, but are not yet sure what the object is telling them.
Investigators hope to find more debris in states like Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and California because that would offer the best clues as to what was happening on Columbia earlier in its re-entry.
Meanwhile, NASA has released a series of images taken by the Air Force from Hawaii of Columbia orbiting overhead. All of the images show the shuttle's payload bay, not the belly of the orbiter, and don't indicate anything unusual.
Also, the Gehman Board's new Web site is up and running. Go to http://www.caib.us for information about the board's activities and to learn how to contact the board directly if you have any debris reports to make, or theories to offer.
The board's first pubic hearing is scheduled for March 6 at the University of Houston in Clear Lake.
One thing that wasn't discussed at the Board's media briefing on Tuesday was the existence of this videotape, which is reported to begin about nine minutes before the shuttle officially entered Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1.
The footage is said to show the astronauts working normally on Columbia's flight deck, apparently unconcerned of any trouble.
The tape ends about four minutes before flight controllers began seeing the first indication from sensors that something was going wrong aboard the shuttle.
No other tape remains on the badly damaged cassette.
Officials did not want to talk about the tape or release it until family member had seen it first. It is expected to be released to the public during the next few days.
advertisement
