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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""

10 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. 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."
  2. Grow up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It was a found a week or so ago and its identity confirmed today.

  3. Better article by Erect+Horsecock · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here More information than the press blurb in the article

    --
    I hope you die painfully and alone.
  4. Note to self by 0x0d0a · · Score: 5, Funny

    Note to self: Check out what data recovery firm is doing work for NASA on the flight recorder. Keep in mind for any future problems. Anyone that can resurrect a recording device that's been blasted from an exploding spacecraft into the top of the atmosphere, subjected to incredible, rock-melting heat, and then slammed into the ground at terminal velocity can probably handle anything.

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    May we never see th
    1. Re:Note to self by bzcpcfj · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What is most remarkable is that the medium is TAPE. With all the improvements in storage technology, it's amazing that tape is still (apparently) the most effective means of reliably storing and recovering data in catastrophic situations. Of course, Galileo's tape system survived numerous passes through radiation fields that would have fried many systems, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

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      ---Any philosophy that can be put "in a nutshell" belongs there.---
    2. Re:Note to self by Zapman · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you're backing up serious data, tape is the only viable solution.

      The technology is old. Or rather, mature. Most, if not all of the bugs have been worked out years ago. At work we have some LTO drives. IIRC, they can be written to at 20 mbytes/second, and they hold 60 gbytes uncompressed (and 120 using the hardware compression. Granted, this assumes the data isn't compressed already. Realisticly, you can only get about 80-90 GB per tape.). You can engineer tapes to be increadibly resiliant to almost anything. The only moving part in DLT or LTO tapes is a spindle that can be turned by the drive. The spool is unwound into the drive itself, and rewound back into the tape cartridge. There are also 2 spool designs with the 'read area' in the middle like cassette tapes. There are also tapes in the 100/200gb range, and the speed and size keeps increasing linearly.

      What other medium's are out there?

      1) CDROM/DVDROM Slow to write, and not much data. Good shelf life (20-30 years) though. Usually CD's are used for 'archival' purposes. AKA "The IRS decrees that this data must be kept for the next 15 years."

      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.

      3) Hard disk? WAY to fragile. We moved a batch of 20 or so servers with about 2 TB of disk this weekend. We lost 7 disks (of around 150).

      At this point, untill someone comes up with a remarkably new idea, tape will be the king of long term, high density data storage for the forseable future.

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      Zapman
    3. 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...
  5. 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.

  6. RTA by TitaniumFox · · Score: 4, Informative

    The recorder, sources told ABCNEWS, starts 10 minutes before Columbia's descent and measures the ship's temperature, aerodynamic pressure and other data. The information would not have been transmitted to NASA mission control during the flight.

    Emphasis mine...

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    -- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
  7. Re:Probably doesn't mean much by mcpheat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    According to the BBC it was the Orbiter Experiments Recorder that they found which was designed to provide data on Columbia's test flights. I'm surprised they didn't remove it when they last refurbished it to reduce weight.