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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."
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.
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.
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