When the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas in 2003, it was a disaster and tragedy for many obvious reasons. One news item that was lost — literally — amidst the wreckage was that some scientific experiments being done were also destroyed.
However, there is a somewhat happier ending for at least one of them. An experiment done on board Columbia was testing certain physical properties of xenon gas. The data were recorded on a hard dive, and it was assumed the drive burned up or was destroyed upon impact along with most everything else from the mission.
However, the hard drive was recovered. Not only that, but the data on the drive were recovered as well! And now, years after the accident, the scientists were able to publish their results, which is rather nice to hear.
I’m not happy with NASA’s direction of late in sacrificing science for ill-advised missions, and I was never happy about the science capabilities of the Shuttle or the space station. But it’s nice to see, in one small way, that some of what science was being done was able to be saved.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
That’s actually unbelievable considering the stresses involved. Seriously. It takes so little to destroy a hard drive.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Cripe, my laptop hard drive can barely stand being toted around in my bag all day. Way to go, NASA
May 6th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Actually, quite a bit of the science was saved. Much of the data were downlinked while the Shuttle was in orbit, so only the physical specimens themselves were lost (and even then not in all cases). I was surprised when I found out how much science was salvaged. Like you, I am glad that at least something came out of the mission.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
It’s nice to see some good news come from this tragedy. I have long believed that the Space Shuttle and the ISS are orbiting white elephants. I do not really see the benefits, as of yet of the ISS and the Shuttle never delivered on it’s promise to lower costs of placing satellites in orbit. To me, it seems that the money spent on both the Shuttle and ISS would have been better spent in establishing a lunar base, or going to Mars. Mind you, I am not a scientist and speak as an ordinary layman that is a fan of space research.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I’m just wondering, BA, since you’ve said multiple times you are unhappy with the space shuttle and ISS, what would you do differently?
May 6th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I understand the physical experiment was encased in maybe 3 ’shells’, the outermost of which burnt away. The xenon gas in the core survived intact. I wish I could remember where I read that - either space.com, spacedaily.com or spaceref.com probably. Or was is spaceflightnow.com?
Anyway, surely it’s a plus. Given the terrible tragedy of the Columbia accident, to recover anything the crew worked on has got to be a bonus.
I do however agree with Phil’s comments re the science capabilities of the shuttle and space station, which seem kind of minimal, but if you are going to throw money at it, it’s good to get the data - even given the tragedy in this case.
My own government (British) have been dead against manned spaceflight for decades, and although I question the science capabilities of manned spaceflight - as it exists now - I like manned spaceflight. The Hubble servicing missions and the ISS construction has without doubt added immense experience to NASA and the Russian Space Agency about how to do large scale and delicate work - that will be useful in future. And of course the work on Mir.
I wonder how well the Chinese will manage in their forthcoming spacewalk. They do however have the advantage of Russian and American documentation about how it’s done.
The Russians and Americans have defined that - really rather thoroughly.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
You might be surprised to learn that their HP printer (2 perhaps) was found operational. HP wisely elected not to advertise this result.
May 6th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
George - a printer survived that? You kidding, surely? you don’t have a link about that do you?
It amazed me actually that *anything* survived except the tiles and anything protected by them, until I discovered that good chunks of rocket stages survive re-entry regularly.
Nic
May 6th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Nic, while NASA may have obtained valuable data about constructing orbiting platforms, I think the ISS is a one off, at least for the foreseeable future. If this project were proposed today, there is no way it would ever get off the ground, at least not to the scale it is now. I still believe the billions thrown at this would have been better spent on continuing Lunar exploration. I know the damage has been done, but I wonder what if…
May 6th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
But what about the Weezer CD?
May 6th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
The ISS was effectively dead when they cut the crew from seven to three.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
EXTREMELY unfortunate typo:
The data were recorded on a hard dive,
J/P=?
May 6th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
It says this was a commercial (”off-the-shelf”?) drive, and they did need to do expensive data recovery. I sure would love to know what brand and make of drive. I think humanity has even more to gain from durable disk drives than from knowing when xenon is like ketchup. Much of our knowledge, much of even this research, is recorded onto hard drives that might not be functional in 20 years.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Bruce:
The Scientific American article states that the hard drive was a Seagate drive. It doesn’t mention the model, but I will try to find out. (I have some very good contacts at Seagate.)
May 7th, 2008 at 2:04 am
[…] Gefunden bei BadAstronomy […]
May 7th, 2008 at 2:41 am
If I owned Seagate, the whole damn world would know who manufactured that drive by now, and I’d never shut up about it.
Jim wouldn’t have to call me to find out the model either, because I’d have that detail - and any other ones I could think of - on a double page spread in the New York Times, run TV ads around the clock on every major network, and already have hired Bruce Willis to star in an Armageddon-style ad for the Super Bowl.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:18 am
It doesn’t really matter what manufacturer. Most data on a hard-drive is recoverable from physical damage (such as fire, being dropped or hit, and in one case I know of, a hard-drive that was shot had its data recovered). That sort of damage affects the outside casing of the drive (which is bloody durable in most cases) and not the disk itself.
Serious data damage normally only occurs whilst drives are actually on and spinning and suffer a mechanical fault, or whilst data is being written to them.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Some rainy day in Boulder, it’d be nice to see a “one citizen-scientist’s humble proposal for the next 20 years of NASA”– What would Phil Plait fund? How does this differ from what they’ll actually fund, and why?
May 7th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Hello all as an engineer currently working in the manned space program I feel it is time to justify my salary. It is true that the ISS and Shuttle never really delivered on its promised benefits, but that hardly denounces the benefits we get from these programs. These programs do (much to my chargrin) take too many funds from unmanned exploration. To be honest NASA’s budget is very tiny compared other expenses.
That being said I do think that it is vitally important that we understand what it takes to be/live in space. Everyday we learn how complicated it is to live in space. Everything from thermal control to air quality to structural health is dreadfully more difficult for low risk manned operations. If we want to put a man on Mars or back to the moon we will want to stay for a while. We need the technological know how and problem solving processes developed.
I do want it known that I do think there is great room for improvement. I just know that if we do not learn these lessons from the ISS and shuttle program future manned space flight will bear the development expense and it won’t be any cheaper later.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:00 am
A lot of surprising things survived the Columbia breakup. These surprises occurred because the shuttle held together as long as she did and had slowed down to Mach 16. There was some heating of the debris, as you may remember from the news videos, but most of the debris was subjected to severe aerodynamic (i.e., wind) forces during the high-speed breakup.
If Columbia had broken apart five minutes earlier when she was at Mach 20, there would have been much less surviving debris because the higher speed would have meant much greater heating of the debris. Heat rate is a function of speed to the third power, so Mach 16 experiences about half of the heating of Mach 20.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:17 am
A friend of mine had an biology experiment on that mission that involved a canister of worms (C. elegans). The canister was found (more or less) intact, and the worms survived. There has been some (squelched) discussion at NASA that the crew of the Columbia might have also survived if the shuttle cabin had been designed with impact and emergency escape in mind.
May 7th, 2008 at 10:11 am
Too bad the shuttle wasn’t made of the same stuff as that hard drive.
~David D.G.
May 7th, 2008 at 10:59 am
I would have thought NASA, being aware that hard-drives can fail if you sneeze on them too hard, would have used solid-state drives…..a big USB pen-drive if you will….I have a couple of 75Gb versions not much bigger than a cigarette pack.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
“I would have thought NASA, being aware that hard-drives can fail if you sneeze on them too hard, would have used solid-state drives”
In cases like this, it’s very easy to second-guess the designers’ choices, since the design requirements are not apparent. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of factors that go into the choices of a particular component for space-flight instrumentation.
A likely scenario is that there were few changes between CVX-2 and CVX, flown in 1997 (which meant the design was finalized several years earlier). The maturity of HD technology over commercially available and cheap solid state drives, including rad-hard qualification was likely a driving factor.
In addition, pointing a chiding finger at NASA for what they (the big monolithic THEY) should have done is flat-out wrong. NASA didn’t build the experiment. While funded by NASA LeRC, the design specifics were the responsibility of the PI and whatever subcontractors were tapped to build the experiment.
I worked on an extremely similar experiment that flew twice on Columbia (STS-62 and STS-75). There are tens of thousands of decisions that are made during the course of the years of design. Without insight into those years of work, it’s really unfair to criticize.
On a personal note, one of the things I cherish from those two Columbia flights are the mission patches I have that flew on the orbiter along with the experiments during those flights.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
That is my impression too. First they starved the SST so that it became a nonmilitary-[military] expensive compromise, then they starved the ISS so it became a nonscience-[science] expensive compromise.
Wanna bet they starved the Orion so it became an orbit-[Moon] expensive compromise?
May 12th, 2008 at 10:16 am
This information may be late in coming, but here it is nevertheless. The hard drive in question was a Seagate model ST9385AG. This is a 2.5-inch, 340MB, 4000 rpm drive, also called the Marathon 340.
Here’s a link to Seagate’s web page, which includes specs and a product manual. (If the link doesn’t work, just go to www.seagate.com and enter the model number.)
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=4b925a802efbd010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US&reqPage=Legacy
Also, here’s a COMPUTERWORLD site with better pictures of the recovered drive:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9083478