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Shuttle Data Recorder May be Key to Accident
DreamerFi writes "A flight data recorder from the space shuttle Columbia, recovered last week in East Texas, contains readings that continue 14 seconds later than any previously studied data. Those readings are likely to play a crucial role in determining the cause of the shuttle's catastrophic breakup on Feb. 1."
A helicopter crashed today, while search for debris. these kinds of accidents slow down the search process, and delay the investigation, which impacts the schedule of futre flights.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
There is a period during the descent through the upper atmosphere when radio communication often is interrupted. Other than that, there is always telemetry being sent back home to mission control.
It is just those few minutes during the radio blackout time that things seemed to go wrong.
The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they are when you kill them.
Radio interference. There's a blackout for a few minutes. I forget the exact reason for this, but I think it has to do with the atmosphere heating up around the outside of the ship, turning into a plasma, and giving off lots of radio waves which interfere with transmissions.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
During one of the original news conferences, a reporter asked if there was a black box, similar to those on aircraft. He was told no because NASA did not believe that they could design a black box that could survive a shuttle disaster. Did NASA lie? No, they told the truth, there are no black boxes designed to withstand a shuttle disaster.
However Columbia did have extra monitoring recorders (to supplement the ground feed) because it was the first shuttle built and flown in space. They later removed some of that equipment, but did leave some of it, including this piece (fortunetly)
AC comments get piped to
Heh. Yes, I know you're joking, but a bit more info for you: I'm pretty sure that Columbia was the only one with a data recorder, or at least a data recorder of this type. It was a 'leftover' from the testing process, and not standard equipment on later shuttles.
I've had this sig for three days.
This being Slashdot, there's a lot of people talking about things they know nothing about, and acting like experts.
There's an excellent FAQ, that will clear up a lot of misconceptions, and hopefully shut up some of the ignorant pedants.
If you're afraid it's a hidden goatse link, here it is naked:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/home.html
Nobody has done it except for the first crew.
STS-112
"Making his first hands-on landing, first-time shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby took over manual control of the shuttle five minutes before touchdown as the spaceplane passed through 50,000 feet above the Florida spaceport. "
STS-93
"Update for 11:17 p.m. EDT
Commander Eileen Collins is taking manual control of Columbia. Three minutes to touchdown. The shuttle has gone sub-sonic. Twin sonic booms now being heard in the local area around Kennedy Space Center."
STS-113
"Following a computer-controlled plunge to a point about 50,000 feet above the Kennedy Space Center, commander James Wetherbee, making a record fifth descent as a shuttle skipper, took over manual control and guided the spaceplane to a breezy landing, reports CBS News Space Consultant William Harwood."
If I remember correctly, the first Shuttle pilot (dunno his name, some ex-Navy pilot)
Pilot, Robert Crippen, USN
Mission commander, John Young, USN
I get most of my understanding of the Shuttle landing procedure from the X-Plane sim, which makes it very clear that it's extremely difficult for a human being to land the Shuttle...
I would suspect that they have a leetle bit more training than you do.
A lot of people have criticized the Shuttle program in the wake of the Columbia tradgedy, and rightly so. Shuttle launches are very expensive, and the ISS has yet to prove its worth as anything but a publicity stunt.
Most of the problems with the current Shuttle design stem from compromises made back in the days of the Skylab program. Some orignal Shuttle designs called for a smaller vehicle with fewer crew (2-3 instead of up to 7). The idea being, these Shuttles would service orbiting labs that could be lifted on Saturn V expendable boosters.
When President Johnson slashed NASA's budget after the Apollo missions, it was clear that launching manned labs on huge expendable boosters was out. So, the Shuttle design was enlarged to carry the payload and crew necessary to support science and military missions using the Shuttle instead of a separate laboratory. The cost of this decision was a Shuttle that costs *more* per launch than a Saturn V, carries less, and may be more dangerous than the Apollo capsules. The root cause of these problems was a political, not technical, decision.
Manned space exploration will continue to be expensive, dangerous, and uneconomical as long as major decisions are made by politicians. Congress and the executive branch need to provide a clear mandate to NASA and approve funding without demanding excessive control over the details. I personally think that NASA should be split between spaceflight research, manned space flight, and unmanned exploration. These three interests compete with each other for scarce funding and as a result, none gets enough attention.
At the point where Columbia was lost, the entry envelope was *DEFINITELY* under computer control.
... It was not 'done', and it has always been 'done' by computers.
At that point in the envelope, I believe only one human being has ever taken the stick, and he let auto-pilot take over. Columbia was doing it as planned: by computer.
Here, read the 8:49 a.m. section here:
Columbia was still going too fast, so at 8:49 a.m. it made the first of three planned sweeping S-curve maneuvers, banking first to the right and, later, to the left. These maneuvers extend the time the shuttle is in the atmosphere and can be slowed by friction.
The computer was still doing the flying, and that was supposed to continue until about three minutes before landing, when the astronauts would take computer-assisted manual control.
If something had gone wrong, said Rob Navias, a press officer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the astronauts could override the computers. It has never been done, and Hauck said it probably would not be done except in the most extreme circumstances, because computers can react more quickly than humans.
Word I have is that this S-curve maneuver has only had human hands involved with it *once*, and it was a quick default back to auto-pilot
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Flight Data Recorders don't use "tape" in the sense of a cassette tape recorder. They use a high tensile wire of some sort. Avation FDR's don't actually have any "medium" as such, they use solid state memory to record something like 3-4 hundred data points for a 24 hour period. then the voice recorders use the wire spool method and record a continous 30 minute loop. The recorders themselves are a box made of titanium around a steel armor shell, then impact insulation, a thermal barrier, an internal core armor shell, and another impact insulation layer then the componets. case penetration by the data bearing medium is in 50's style connectors. THink big wires and lots of steel. I found a table of the statistics on civil avation flight data recorders: Time recorded: 25 hours continuous Number of parameters: 300 - 500+ Impact tolerance: 3400Gs / 6.5ms Fire resistance: 1100oC for 30 minutes Water pressure resistance: Submerged 20,000ft Underwater locator beacon: 37.5 kHz Battery: 6 year shelf life/30 day operation the stats are the same for the Cockpit Voice Recorder except they say that solid state CVRs record 2 hour loops. and the wire spool ones record 30 minute loops. If I were to guess this Flight Data Recorder they found is a redundant backup unit or something. I would imagine they would use solid state FDRs to record the shuttle just because of the sheer increase of bandwidth available to them via it. Just my humble opinion.
feh
No probs. Even a standard cheap shit safe box can keep data safe for 2h at 910C outside. That is the minimal criteria for a data safe and for example my safe box at home has been sertified to it (I hope it never get tested in real conditions if the cert is real).
So I do not see a problem for a dedicated collection box to keep tape alive in it. After all it is not the box to survive. It is the tape within.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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