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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."
In other news: Water Suspected to be Wet
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
This is an "Ask Slashdot" that I submitted a few weeks back.
Can't seem to find the article that I quoted from when I submitted this to Slashdot, will see if I can dig up...
'Under the conditions of a normal return to earth, the shuttle flies on autopilot until it is traveling more slowly than the speed of sound. But pilots train to take the shuttle all the way down in case the autopilot malfunctions, and so it is possible one of the pilots was trying to take control of the yawing craft in its final moments. 'It is relatively easy for the autopilot to be turned off by accident, which in fact happened just minutes before the problems with the Columbia started to become apparent. In the recovered segment of flight deck video of the waning minutes of the flight released by NASA, Colonel Husband is heard to exclaim, "Oh, shoot," and to tell mission control that "we bumped the stick earlier," briefly disengaging the autopilot. He quickly and calmly corrected the error'
What this all leads me to is this, and I have not seen this suggested in anything I have read as an important concern: Is it possible that this accidental disengaging of the autopilot CONTRIBUTED to the loss of the Shuttle? Although the pilots are trained to fly the Shuttle without the Autopilot, if they were unaware that it was turned off then the "minute" adjustments that either one would make would be missed. All accounts I have seen suggest that the slightest details on the approach make HUGE differences in the results. Add to this the fact that it has been reported that the Autopilot, when on, was acting to correct the flight path anomalies caused by the damage outside. If the autopilot is off, then what other consequences were being experienced?
Is it possible that this with the likely outside damage and other factors may have COMBINED have caused the loss of the Shuttle where any issue ALONE would have not? With all the speculation I have seen in the media, I am not sure this is any less of a possibility...
BTW, I personally am not trying to lay blame on the astronauts themselves. Much like a Cruise Control that starts to mysteriously disengage on a vehicle, I would not be surprised if the Autopilot may have "sensed" a disengage as simple as moving the stick, and the pilots assumed that one of them must have done it."
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
This is really a great find, and an unintended one at that. Shuttles don't carry "black box" flight data recorders like commercial aircraft do. A data recorder, while useful in an accident, was thought unlikely to survive re-entry in a catastrophic event.
Why, then, does Columbia have the OEX recorder? Simple - Columbia was one of the first Shuttles to fly to orbit, and the engineers at NASA wanted a data recorder on board so they could examine and validate some characteristics of the vehicle design.
The OEX recorder contains far more information than a simple "black box". Finding it, intact, will greatly aid the understanding of what went wrong, and hopefully lead to increased safety on future Shuttle flights. Perhaps, something similar to the OEX recorder will be integrated into the other Shuttles, since it looks like a data recorder can survive re-entry.
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Vpered na Mars!
... hands-on.
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Nobody has done it except for the first crew. If I remember correctly, the first Shuttle pilot (dunno his name, some ex-Navy pilot) attempted to manually guide the Shuttle during its landing approach, and did so for a few minutes only to give up and let the auto-pilot take over, mid-way through.
I could have this story wrong (hey, it happens) but I do remember that there's little reason - other than extreme catastrophic failure of onboard systems - for a Shuttle pilot to attempt to override the autopilot. Such catastrophic failures of the onboard systems would definitely have been detected by NASA on the ground previously
So, I'd say, there's little chance that an autopilot-override was performed by the crew which lead to the failure.
But then, I dunno. 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...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I dunno. Every time there is an accident involving air travel, one of those flight recorders is usually somewhere in the vicinity. I'm starting to get suspicious...
Tar is good for preserving some data for a very long time. A good example is dinosaurs, although the technique has also been applied to various small mammals. The problem with using tar for something like the space shuttle missions is that the write bandwidth and latency are both very low. While the write bandwidth scales linear with the surface of the tar (and with the cube root of the volume of the tar), space missions are mass-limited and could carry only a very little tar. Also, the latency is a real issue, as most of the data stored during the mission would not have time to be fully written before the accident occured.
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
Moreover, travelling and re-entry at 13,000 miles an hour is downright scary.
Exactly.
I think it is very tragic, the loss of the shuttle crew, but people really should not react to it as though there is some expected guarantee of a crew's safe return home. Sure, safety is one of the #1 concerns and considerations in the space program, but we are trying to "boldly go where no man/one has gone before." Space has risks and there are unknown variables. Should we turn away from space travel / research because of these risks? Is that what the crew, who you can be sure were well aware of said risks, would have wanted?
I think not.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
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