Officials at NASA got an unexpected clue to the fate of the shuttle Columbia yesterday from a super-powerful Air Force camera that took pictures apppearing to show damage to the shuttle’s left wing.
The photos taken from the ground in New Mexico – and shot minutes before the shuttle disintegrated in the Earth’s atmosphere last Saturday, killing seven astronauts – were handed over to NASA officials, who said the photos were “not very revealing” but would be examined closely.
“It is not clear to me that there is something there,” said shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore after showing a fuzzy silhouette at a news conference.
“It does look like there’s something just a little different about the left-hand side behind the wing than the right-hand side,” he said. “That does look a little different to us, and is an area of investigation.”
The magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology, quoting sources close to the investigation, first reported the photos yesterday and said they show a jagged leading edge on Columbia’s left wing near the spot where a foam piece hit during blast-off.
On Thursday, NASA officials backed away from the theory that the foam caused the fatal damage.
Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the Directed Energy Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, said the pictures were taken by cameras that can recognize features as small as 1 foot in length from 600 miles away.
Meanwhile, searchers found the leading edge of one of the shuttle’s wings near Fort Worth, Texas, which is the most significant piece of shuttle rubble yet uncovered.
“Given the anomalies that we have on the descent coming through the left wing, obviously this structure is very important,” said Michael Kostelnik, head of NASA’s shuttle programs.
In addition to the discovery of the photos and the new piece of wreckage, NASA probed the possibility that a piece of deadly “space junk” hit the craft at high speed.
The space agency said there are some 8,500 objects larger than the size of a softball and some 150,000 objects roughly the size of a marble in Earth’s orbit.
NASA said they have not ruled out a collision with such debris as the cause of the Columbia crash.
NASA also considered whether tiny pinholes, the diameter of a human hair, may have been present in the wing and caused the crash under the stress of landing.