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Columbia's Final Minutes in Detail
grub writes "This article on Newsday has an excerpt from 'Comm Check... The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia,' by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood describing the last minutes of Columbia's final flight in detail."
While original reports used the term "plasma", there's a good explanation at space.com's Columbia FAQ that explains that the hot gas that entered the shuttle's wing was *not* "plasma", as defined by science:Not to be a science nazi, but there's an important distinction between sci-fi-sounding "plasma" and the mundane -- but still deadly -- "very hot gas".
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There's a memorial at Cape Canaveral with the names of ALL of the people who have died in our pursuit of outer space.
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Above and beyond this article, if you can get your hands on the article on the Colombia tragedy which was published in Atlantic Monthly, do it. As always for Atlantic Monthly, easily the most intelligent commentary I've seen about the event, and a couple of closing sentences that will stay with me forever.
...it's an incredible piece, and very well written. One never understands such things until it is succinctly written out, and these authors did an amazing job.
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According to the article, they would have died instantaneously at that point 19 miles up due to blunt trauma, lack of oxygen, etc. So, while it is still sad and horrible, it isn't like he fell 19 miles still alive.
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well, they were already moving at a faster than terminal velocity so when the atmosphere thickened, they body slowed, depending on the substrate of the ground, the damage to the body (after the burning it took) would be minimal.
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Most of the starvation could be solved if (not to make fun) we sent them luggage instead of food. They live in a desert with no food or water.. That's not a tragedy, that's natural selection.
At least credit Sam Kinison. (Not like he's gonna do anything about it.)
Not exactly. Bear in mind that after 1989, Americans are allowed to consider Russians as people too.
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There's also a Columbia crew memorial on Mars now.
It's murder by management if the engineers tell management "hey, this part isn't strong enough, we have to use a stronger part or some cars are going to blow up" and management says "nah, that'll cost too much, forget it". Ford Motor Company was in fact indicted for second-degree murder over the notorious exploding Pinto gas tank, after it came out that basically the above engineer-management exchange had taken place.
Similar exchanges took place before the Challenger explosion (engineers didn't want to launch until the O-ring erosion had been fixed, and management overruled them) and the Columbia crash (engineers wanted photos of the insulation damage so if necessary they could make a contingency plan, and management spiked the request). So those also fit the pattern of murder by management.
Do check out the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report at http://www.caib.us/. Or, after February 1st, go to the main NASA site and look for the links to the CAIB report.
Management and political leadership did kill.
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From launch, there was no way of the Columbia to reach the ISS. Different orbits and speeds, no fuel and the laws of physics. Look here.
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Unfortuantely, there was no way for Columbia to get tot the ISS even if they had known about the problem. The Columbia was the heaviest shuttle in the fleet and was incapable of getting to the orbit that ISS is at even if a mission called for it.
Also, when a shuttle mission is sent to the ISS they have to carry special equipment in the cargo area to actually connect the shuttle to ISS and transfer crew members. The Columbia obviously didn't have that kind of equipment along.
From what I understand, about the only thing they could have done had they known was a) try and launch another shuttle to evacuate the crew, or b) bring them down in Columbia and hope that the shuttle would hold together long enough for the crew to be able to use an escape hatch and parachute to the ground. The likelihood of getting another shuttle prepped in time was almost nill so it's quite possible that even if they did know they didn't really have an alternative anyway.
-Brian
To be a plasma, the gas should have many free electrons (or ions) in each Debye length. There could be many more neutrals, just along for the ride, in the same space.
Most molecular gases become more or less fully ionized at around 10,000 degrees Kelvin (give or take a factor of four or so, depending on composition) since that's the temperature at which the collision energy becomes significant compared to valence electron binding energies, so most collisions can make new ions. So anything hotter than that is definitely plasma.
But even a fraction of a percent ionization is often enough to give you the nice bulk behavior of a plasma, because the ionized particles do their thing and drag along the neutral ones by collision. Depending on the density, it's probably reasonable to call the 8,000F (3800K) gases "plasma".
Parent poster is operating under a series of faulty assumptions and applying some bad reasoning.
When you've got an object traveling very vast what happens? What happens when you move your feet across the carpet? Static electricity. What is static? Electrons stripped from one object to another.
Static charge accumulates when loosely-held valance electrons transfer from less to more electonegative atoms. (Electronegativity is a measure of an atom's tendency to attract electrons.) It is analagous but not identical to dissociation, which occurs in plasma formation. Dissociation is the complete stripping of electrons from the nucleus, even the tightly-held inner shell electrons, which do not transfer when you shock someone by scuffing your feet on the rug. Dissociation, especially of diatomic gases such as O2 and N2, the major components of the atmosphere, requires immense amounts of energy. N2, for example, dissociates around 9000K (~16,000 deg F). For comparison, graphite vaporizes at about 6000K (~10,000 deg F).
Static can be a huge problem in pipes that move large amounts of non-polar fluids. Guess what most gasses in the upper atmosphere are? Non-polar fluids. So, there is your ionized high velocity, high temperature gas. Plasma.
I don't know alot about the shuttle's design, but I'd guess that if you talked with some NASA aerospace engineers they'd confirm this phenomenon. It's got to be a factor with all very fast aircraft.
Static charge is not plasma. Plasma requires complete ionization, and static doesn't even come close.
Static is not a problem insofar as flight mechanics are concerned. It may be a factor for avionics, as much as it is for any electrical system, but that is outside my area of experience.
-Carolyn
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The likelihood of getting another shuttle prepped in time was almost nill
Actually the shuttle for the next mission was already at the pad and mostly prepped, the launch date was about a month away.
Step up the prep rate for that launch and put Columbia into survival mode (minimal power use, ration the consumables, etc) and they might have done it -- assuming they'd realized the problem right after launch rather than after a week in orbit squandering supplies.
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How can a hole being ripped in the wing, or any other part of the shuttle not be picked up by some sensor?
The leading edge of the shuttle's wing is flat. Over that goes a series of reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) panels which form a smooth, aerodynamically-friendly shape. These RCC panels are shaped something like a V rotated 90 degrees. This creates a small cavity between the RCC panels and the leading edge spar of the wing, which is where the RCC panels are bolted on.
The bolts that hold the RCC panels to the spar are covered in insulation designed to take up to 3,200 degrees F.
The initial impact created a hole in the underside portion of the RCC panels, but did not go through the leading-edge of the wing itself.
So to detect this you would need to either have sensors on or inside the cavity of the RCC panels OR you detect it by the hole's effects on the wing, such as an increase in left-side drag.
From what bits I've read of the CAIB's final report, I don't believe there are any sensors on the inside of the RCC panels or inside the cavity between the RCC panels and the leading edge of the wing. Reason being it can get pretty hot in there and would probably destroy any sensors that were placed inside. So no direct sensor readings are going to detect the hole, becaue there aren't any.
So now to detect it right away you need to be able to observe the hole's effects in the form of drag. Problem is, this hole was on the underside of the wing. During ascent the shuttle is pointed vertically up so the effects of this 8 inch hole would be minimal at best and went undetected. Once in orbit, drag, for the purposes of this discussion, doesn't exist.
So there really wasn't any way to detect the hole or its effects.
The only way, until re-entry, would be a visual inspection of the area.
The shuttle wasn't carrying any equipment for a space walk, so that wasn't possible. The shuttle's orientation during orbit is to have it's belly facing away from the Earth, so land-based telescopes and cameras would have been useless.
Spy satellites or some other device in a higher orbit with a camera on board might have been able to do this. But I don't believe a request for such a thing was ever put to the CIA or NSA. It was certainly suggested, but I think the request was never pushed forward.
So that's why it was never detected until it was too late.
The only area I'm not 100% certain on is the sensors inside the RCC cavity. I know during tests of the RCC, they had sensors all over the thing. I've seen pictures of the inside leading edge which had some sensors, but I never saw anything inside the RCC cavity itself.
Given the need for insulation of bolts used to hold the RCC panels to the spar, I think my supposition that it's simply too hot inside that cavity for those sensors may be correct.
Anyone care to correct me on this?
How can a hole being ripped in the wing, or any other part of the shuttle not be picked up by some sensor?
For the same reason they don't make entire planes out of the material they use to make the "Black Boxes:" weight and cost. If you put sensors all over everything, your ship suddenly weighs much, much more, thus takes more fuel to launch, thus increasing the cost considerably. Besides, it's not very often that you experience catastrophic structural failure, and when it does happen (such as in the case of Columbia), it can usually be determined by existing sensors. Such as the spar-stress sensor and wheel well temperature sensors mentioned in the article.
if you level your course, instead of going down into the atmosphere will you just gradually burn up? I'm thinking, skim the outter atmosphere,
Orbit is a very sensitive thing. They started out in a stable orbit. Once they aimed themselves a little lower, they'd have entered an elliptical orbit, were it not for the braking effect of the atmosphere. If they'd instead pulled back up or tried to level off, they'd have skimmed off the atmosphere back into space, but at a different angle than the one required to resume a stable orbit. In short, they'd be heading out into space. They'd have needed substantial fuel to get back into orbit - fuel which they did not have (since this was literally the last few minutes of the mission, and they'd burned all their fuel, save for some maneuvering fuel). The shuttle actually lands with no thrust at all. It is effectively a glider. It needs very little fuel to re-enter.
although if your travelling at 1,568 mph
If they'd only been traveling at 1,568 mph, it would have been almost survivable (at least the breakup portion). RTFA - they were traveling at 15,800 mph (I think you missed a zero there), and that was almost 10 minutes after beginning their descent.
at what point of re-entry is it too late to do any sort of constructive abort?
From everything I've read, it was "too late" the instant the foam hit that panel. They couldn't have launched another shuttle in time, and they didn't have enough fuel to make it to the ISS's orbit, nor the equipment to dock anyway. I suppose it might have been remotely possible for another nation (Russia) to launch a rescue mission, but there wasn't much hope at any point after the impact event.
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Read the actual report of the investigating team. It's written in a very accessible style and comes to the conclusion that a rescue mission would have been possible if the problem had been discovered before reentry.
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Well there is some difference here, the challenger astronauts were probably alove for most of the fall, as they were moving much slower and the crew cabin is thought to have survived until impact with the water. With columbia, they were moving at something like mach 18 when the crew cabin began to break apart, at which point they would be killed instantly by the massive presure change. While the astronaut may have fallen 19 miles to the ground, he was long dead before that (thankfully).
One of the astronauts, Dr. Kalpana Chawla, was an alum of my school. Chawla Hall is a $20 million dorm on campus that is nearing completion. I remember a story in the school newspaper that her husband was not happy with the dedication service when construction began. Everyone tried to make it out to be a deep, spiritual event and that is not how she would have wanted it. She was not a religious person at all, and her husband felt that the religious subversion was completely inappropriate. He even said she would have walked away from the service had she been there.
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Yes but you forget that the Russians have a pile of those ole good disposable and automated Progress resuply ships for the ISS in the pipeline and could have kicked some of those the way of the shuttle floating in wait of rescue since the shuttle would be easier to reach then the ISS those ships are meant for. Hell, they might even have some of those Soyuz ships that could have been launched since they are made on an assembly line and there are always some in varying stages of completion around. Speaking of which there is a 3-seater Soyuz parked at the ISS that might have been capable of allowing 3 people from the shuttle to board it and land in it since it is probably capable of dis-engaging and lowering its orbit to match the shuttle which also had some amount of fuel to manouver and was fully operational. Granted, all very complicated/risky manouvers and all that jazz but it beats what happened. If there is a will there is a way. Manageriots not listening to engineers who knew this shit would happen is what killed those astronauts. Not to mention manageriots with a chip on their shoulder and their "pride" to protect.
Essentially this is a myth circulated by some NASA management apologists.
The term ``plasma'' is often stretched and abused by the low-temperature community. It is sometimes used to refer to a gas that consists only of ions, or only of electrons, even though the term was originally meant to describe charge-neutral clouds. Some Bose-Einstein condensates consist mainly of ions, since the electromagnetic field can then be used to confine them (so they don't hit the floor of the vacuum chamber that holds them). Colloquially, these clouds of cool ions are often referred to as plasma even though free electrons would rapidly neutralize the ions. Likewise, other physicists have captured clouds of electrons (which are fermions and hence can't directly form a bose-einstein condensate, absent some sort of pairing mechanism) and referred to them as a "pure-electron plasma" despite the fact that the cloud is clearly not charge-neutral.
...could they have hung out at the ISS and waited for NASA to send up a rescue craft?
No. Columbia was the oldest orbiter, and even though it had been refit and upgraded in many ways, it still had it's original airframe. Columbia was the heaviest of the orbiters, and unable to achieve the high orbit of the ISS. It was the only shuttle unable to make flights to the space station.
Even IF Columbia were able to achieve the altitude needed for docking, it was in an orbit that would take it nowhere near ISS. And IF it had been able to make it to ISS, Columbia did not have the docking module needed to dock to ISS. Without the docking module, the crew would need to EVA to get to ISS. Columbia did not have the spacesuits needed for this.
Columbia's ONLY option would be to wait for Atlantis, and Atlantis would have to be preped for launch in such a hurry that it's crew would be at extreme risk.
Columbia should have been retired a long time ago. We should have been using a 2nd gen shuttle by now. It may be sad to think that the shuttle fleet is to be retired with NASA's Mars goals, but in truth it was time.
I'm a big fan of the Space program, but NASA's claims that the shuttle fleet was designed to fly for 50 years should fail anybody's smell test. We don't use school buses for 50 years. Are we supposed to believe that they accounted for 50 years of metal fatigue when designing the shuttle fleet?
After Challenger NASA placed the odds for loss of a shuttle at 1 in 100. Those are risky odds. You wouldn't fly on an airplane with those odds.
The Shuttles never made the price of lauching satelites cheaper (it's primary goal) and it never made the turnaround cycle shorter than disposable launch systems.
It's time for NASA to get out of the trucking business and back to science.
I spent a few hours pouring over the CAIB report which contains a lot of very clear and sound details about how they found out what went wrong.
It's worth taking a look at, as it gave a lot of insight into how they used the recovered parts to determine exactly what happened. The graphs that show where each tile fell on the ground makes it very clear where the problem started. The sensor timelines also give clues about how the fire spread inside the wing. Internal emails are included to show how the problem was acknowledged but played down, and how many missed opportunities there were to have discovered the problem while still in space.
It's definitely worth downloading and at browsing through if you have any interest at all in the space program.
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"We never lost a Saturn V, but it was only used for 13 launches," Your point is right on; the shuttle's safety record is spectacular, but didn't NASA lose the crew of a Saturn V when they were doing a "plugs out" test during Apollo 1 testing? They filled the crew compartment with pure oxygen and the astronauts were incinerated on the pad. If you take that data into account, the shuttle's record looks even better (1:13 v. 2:113)
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Then why not compare with Soyuz? Or Gemini/Apollo/Soyuz combined? The last fatal Soyuz accident happened in 1971. More than a hundred launches since, no fatalities or injuries. There *were* two accidents in which the escape system saved the crew: Soyuz 18-1 (1975 -- in-flight failure) und Soyuz T-8 (1983 -- rocket exploded on the pad). Both these accidents would have been pretty much "unsurvivable" had they happened with the Shuttle.
The Shuttle is inherently less safe than Soyuz/Apollo designs. You have lots of completely useless structures like wings which only add complexity. You only have a few airports to land on in case of emergency, instead of, say, the whole ocean. There is no escape system like Soyuz's or Apollo's. The crew compartment is not mounted on top of the rocket, but strapped to the side of it, which means that in case of any serious failure of the rocket, you're pretty much doomed, where on Soyuz or Apollo you would have activated the escape system. And remember -- with the capsule mounted on top, foam can fall off the rocket all it wants -- it can't do any harm.
Yep, you're exactly right on how to change inclination. If you imagine your orbit as a plane, an out-of-plane burn causes your inclination to change. However, these burns are not efficient since you're also fighting angular momentum. Getting a little bit back on topic, in order to reduce heating loads and/or move the center of mass for re-entry, the space shuttle often will dump extra propellant. The best way to do this with minimum effect on the orbit geometry: you guessed it - an out-of-plane burn.
Soyuz rescue isn't a bad idea, but you'd be better off launching a fresh one as opposed to trying to undock from the station (which, on top of the propellant problem, you're also violating a flight rule for the station by leaving that crew without an escape vehicle). But the problem with launching a fresh Soyuz, assuming one could be scrambled quick enough, is that the Cosmodrome is at 51.6 deg N latitude. Due to that physical location, your orbital inclinations are restricted to 51.6 deg or higher (unless you waste fuel flying to 39 deg N then east) -- so you can't reach the 39 deg orbit that the shuttle is currently parked in. Did that make sense?
I believe the article contains a slight inaccuracy in that the RCC panels were actually made to take the heat and force of a turbulent flow.
Remember, back in the 1970's when the shuttles were designed, Computational Fluid Dynamics didn't really exist and they didn't have the techniques or the brute force computational power to solve the Navier-Stokes equations to see if it was going to be a turbulent flow or a laminar flow. So as a result the RCC panels are actually about two times as thick as they need to be.
So, basically the other panels were handling the temperature and aerodynamic loads just fine, it was the stream of super heated gas that got inside the wing that did all the damage. In fact if you read the CAIB report it says that the shuttle could have survived if the RCC panels had not been breached and instead had only been damaged. It was the breach that caused all the problems, not the rough surface nor the turbulent flow.
I know this because when the Columbia accident occurred my incompressible aerodynamics professor pulled out copies of some of the actual analysis of the shuttle from back in the '70's. They were pretty cool to look at and were using some of the same techniques we were learning.
Anyway, thats just my slight nit pick. On the whole it was a very moving article.
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