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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""

1 of 33 comments (clear)

  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.