CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Shuttle Columbia was maneuvering to stay on course for landing Saturday even as sensors on the spaceplane's left wing recorded rapidly increasing temperatures in the minutes before all contact was lost.
Particularly interesting to investigators was where some of the indications of heat were coming from: the shuttle's outside skin just above the left wing, and the wheel well holding Columbia's left-hand main landing gear.
Those were among the newest technical facts discussed by NASA officials Sunday as the around-the-clock effort continued to study data recorded in Mission Control and recover debris strewn across at least four states.
At the same time, NASA's set of mishap teams have organized and are in place to formally sift through all the information and wreckage associated with the tragedy, determine what wrong, come up with corrective action and get flying again as soon as it is safe to do so.
"It's going to takes us some days and weeks ahead to put it all together and make sure we have it correct," said shuttle program director Ron Dittemore.
And while all of that is happening, NASA officials also are preparing for Tuesday's planned memorial service at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in which Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Mike Anderson, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon will be remembered.
President and Mrs. Bush will be on hand for the service, which is to begin at 12:45 p.m. EST (1745 GMT). The event will be carried live on NASA TV. SPACE.com will webcast the event.
New timeline
Each day the picture of exactly what happened to shuttle Columbia on Saturday is getting a little more clear.
By the time Dittemore briefed the news media on Sunday only 32 hours has passed since the vehicle and crew were lost, yet the amount of information so far analyzed and released by NASA made it more apparent than ever that the solution to the problem is in understanding what happened to the left wing and why.
"We've got some more detective work, but we're making progress inch by inch," Dittemore said, cautioning that "As we gather more evidence, certainly the evidence may take us in another direction."
The facts described by Dittemore included this new evidence:
- At 8:53 a.m. EST (1353 GMT) three sensors located in the left-hand wheel well "rose significantly," climbing 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes and was the first indication of a problem involving heat where it's not supposed to be.
Wiring for a set of four sensors toward the back of the wing that had failed passes near the wheel well, suggesting that a problem in the wheel well area was the cause.
- At 8:54 a.m. EST (1354 GMT) sensors on the outside wall of Columbia's fuselage above the left wing showed a 60-degree rise in temperature in five minutes, while the sensors on the right side showed a more normal 15-degree rise -- an indication that a significant heating problem was taking place on the left side.
- At 8:58 a.m. EST (1358 GMT) the flaps on the left wing began moving to steer the shuttle on course after computers detected the shuttle was beginning to fly off course due to increased drag on the left wing -- something that would be caused by a disruption of the airflow going over what may have no longer been a smooth surface if there was some heat protection tile damage.
At the same time, the wheel well sensors measuring temperature and pressure of the left main-landing gear failed, but did so in a staggered fashion, Dittemore said he was "fairly confident" that indicated the tire had not exploded. If the tire had burst the sensors likely would have failed at the same instant.
- At 8:59 a.m. EST (1359 GMT) the flaps on the left wing appeared to be struggling with an even greater amount of drag on the wing as Columbia wanted to roll off course, and then loss of signal happened.
More details
Dittemore spoke of at least two more sources of information that could help the investigation.
The first is that some 32 seconds of additional telemetry recorded as the vehicle broke up might shed some new light on what happened.
That information wasn't immediately available because the Mission Control computers will only pass on data to flight controllers at their consoles if that data is of a certain quality and meets several automatic tests for reliability.
But the data is still there, nonetheless, so by manually examining it, it's possible that additional readings from sensors and flight control instruments could continue to allow officials to refine their picture of what happened, and possibly why.
"It should take us no time at all to get that data," Dittemore said. "We've done it in the past. We did it during Challenger. So we're going to go after this information."
Another source of information is coming from a reputable observer in California who watched Columbia pass overhead and allegedly saw pieces of debris falling from the shuttle.
Dittemore said they have interviewed the eyewitness and are now trying to overlay the timing of those observations with the technical data to see how things match up, and if that also allows them to better tell what happened and why.
"We're going to overlay his report with what the data shows to us and hopefully the two of them will help us piece together a path that might help lead us to the cause," Dittemore said.
"Again, we're very early in our analysis and we're still poring over a lot of data. So bear with us as we go through this effort and bear with us as we report to you because it's going to be fluid, it's going to change, and it's certainly possible we'll contradict ourselves from day to day. That's just the nature of what we have to go through right now."
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