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Shuttle Columbia Flight Recorder Recovered In Texas

Posted by timothy on from the what-it-was-intended-for dept.

ctar writes "ABC News reports that the space shuttle Columbia's flight recorder has been found in Hemphill Texas. ABC says: "The finding today came after NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said investigators may never find a single definitive cause for the destruction of Columbia""

5 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Clues by c4tp's+friend · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hopefully this will solve the problem resolutely.

    --
    I dont like it when people think about what I think (say). Rather I try to make them think like I think.
  2. A slashdot strategy... by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 2, Insightful

    While this is interestng news, it's pretty untimely.

    My guess is that the Slashdot editors are using this article to push the Iraq debate one topic lower, and hopefully reduce the traffic...

    1 hour, 900 posts. Holy crap.

    --
    "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
  3. Probably doesn't mean much by gravelpup · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The shuttle's recorder is pretty much redundant, since they send everything down in realtime anyway. It's unlikely that this will tell us anything new, IMHO.

    --

    Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

    1. Re:Probably doesn't mean much by arb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The shuttle's recorder is pretty much redundant, since they send everything down in realtime anyway. It's unlikely that this will tell us anything new, IMHO.

      Except when the shuttle is tumbling all over the place and the antenna is not pointing anywhere near one of the receiving stations... The recorder could contain some information that it gathered while the shuttle was out of control. A large chunk of the "last 32 seconds" of data transmitted by the shuttle is missing and/or unusable. The recorder will hopefully be able to fill in the gaps there and maybe give some clues to what happened even later in the process.

  4. Re:Note to self by rusty0101 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    2) Flash? it's solid state, and no moving parts, but the write speed SUCKS for real data sizes. Also, the density just isn't there. IIRC flash cards top out at 512 mb now.

    While I won't argue about write speed, Flash in cf format is becoming available in capacities of 4 Gig, see story at C|Net. Doing ide raid with this would cover much of the speed barrier by distributing writes across many cards. It would also increase capacity.

    How much data is going to be captured anyway. If it is a stream of values for several sensors sampled at 8khz, is doubtful to exceed the write speed of the current types of flash.

    At the same time we are looking at hardware that is decades old....

    -Rusty

    --
    You never know...