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Nasa didn`t think its best minds would go wrong
Houston, Feb 04: Nasa acknowledged that its `best and brightest` minds may have gotten it wrong when they concluded in a report four days before Columbia disintegrated that a flying, 2.5-pound (1-kilogram) chunk of insulation did no serious damage to the shuttle`s thermal tiles during liftoff.
Houston, Feb 04: Nasa acknowledged that its "best and brightest" minds may have gotten it wrong when they concluded in a report four days before Columbia disintegrated that a flying, 2.5-pound (1-kilogram) chunk of insulation did no serious damage to the shuttle`s thermal tiles during liftoff.
Shuttle programme manager Ron Dittemore said Monday the agency will redo the entire analysis from scratch.
"We want to know if we made any mistakes," he said.
Practically from the start, investigators have focused on the possibility that a 20-inch (51-centimeter) piece of foam insulation that fell off the shuttle`s big external fuel tank during liftoff January 16 doomed the spacecraft by damaging the heat tiles that keep the ship from burning up during re-entry into the atmosphere. While Columbia was still in orbit, Nasa engineers analysed launch footage frame-by-frame and were unable to determine for certain whether the shuttle was damaged. But they ran computer analyses for different scenarios and different assumptions about the weight of the foam, its speed, and where under the left wing it might have hit, even looking at the possibility of tiles missing over an area of about 7 inches by 30 inches (18 centimeters by 76 centimeters), Nasa said. The half-page engineering report - issued on Day 12 of the 16-day flight - indicated "the potential for a large damage area to the tile." But the analyses showed "no burn-through and no safety-of-flight issue," the report concluded, according to a copy released by Nasa on Monday.
High-level officials at Nasa said they agreed at the time with the engineers` assessment.
"We want to know if we made any mistakes," he said.
Practically from the start, investigators have focused on the possibility that a 20-inch (51-centimeter) piece of foam insulation that fell off the shuttle`s big external fuel tank during liftoff January 16 doomed the spacecraft by damaging the heat tiles that keep the ship from burning up during re-entry into the atmosphere. While Columbia was still in orbit, Nasa engineers analysed launch footage frame-by-frame and were unable to determine for certain whether the shuttle was damaged. But they ran computer analyses for different scenarios and different assumptions about the weight of the foam, its speed, and where under the left wing it might have hit, even looking at the possibility of tiles missing over an area of about 7 inches by 30 inches (18 centimeters by 76 centimeters), Nasa said. The half-page engineering report - issued on Day 12 of the 16-day flight - indicated "the potential for a large damage area to the tile." But the analyses showed "no burn-through and no safety-of-flight issue," the report concluded, according to a copy released by Nasa on Monday.
High-level officials at Nasa said they agreed at the time with the engineers` assessment.
"We were in complete concurrence," Michael Kostelnik, a Nasa spaceflight office deputy, said at a news conference Monday with Nasa`s top spaceflight official, William Readdy.
"The best and brightest engineers we have who helped design and build this system looked carefully at all the analysis and the information we had at this time, and made a determination this was not a safety-of-flight issue."
The analyses spanned a week and no one on the team, to Dittemore`s knowledge, had any reservations about the conclusions and no one reported any concerns to a Nasa hotline set up for just such occasions.
Bureau Report