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Data Recovered From Space Shuttle Columbia HDD
WmHBlair writes "Data recovered from a 400MB Seagate hard drive carried on the Space Shuttle Columbia has been used to complete a physics experiment performed on the mission in space. The Johnson Space Center sent the recovered drive to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Considering the shape the drive was in (see picture in the linked article), it could indeed qualify for the 'most amazing disk data recovery ever.'" Update: 05/08 12:51 GMT by T : Reader lucas123 points out a piece at Computerworld with a series of photos of the recovered drive.
Data recovery has come a long way, keep this in mind when not using proper deletion techniques! Would have been nice to see a picture of the HDD though, to get a full understanding of the recovery.
I will probably never use the term "crash" to describe a hard drive failure again.
I'll bet Ontrack made a fortune off of this recovery, too.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Their server is shooting flames as I type this, but they have the technology to recover their site!
At least the pic of the server is still intermittently retrievable!
It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.
Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.
Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.
The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.
The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thinning.
It was a highly complex experiment needing prologed and detailed analysis of the data on the hard drive to discover the shear thinning effect. But it, like the drive, was eventually found. So ends a twenty-year research project and in doing so helps bring to a finish the dreadful story of the Columbia Space Shuttle mission.
Wow! They recovered 400MB of data when all they had to work with was "500 Internal Server Error"?! Unbelievable!!!
So someone put together a story on spectacular hard disk failure, space shuttle, physic experiments and heroic success, and decided to host this on anything less than an industrial-strength web server? The only thing that could have made for a quicker or larger slashdotting would be if somehow it also involved big guns and Natalie Portman (with hot grits, petrified).
Seriously people. Show some foresight here. At least the editors should have shown some mercy.
Soooo.... anyone got a coral cache of it?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I think when you're intending to launch something into space using a couple of giant rockets, you might be concerned about vibration shaking normal bolts loose.
As for the condition of the drive, it's hard to say. The exterior was obviously fried, but it was still basically drive-shaped, and from the picture it's impossible to say how damaged the platters were. If the outside was messed up but the platters were still intact, I would think recovery would be fairly simple. Would have been nice to include a picture of the interior of the drive, or maybe even multiple pictures as they took it apart.
Article on softpeida about it with pictures. http://news.softpedia.com/news/400-MB-Seagate-Drive-Survives-the-Columbia-Space-Shuttle-Disaster-84826.shtml
Great, so it was you that finished off the server. gatzke effect. Not really got the same ring to it.
Almost looks like the site is denying visits when the referer is slashdot.org. With the below method, I was able to read the full article with no problems.
To get in, simply copy the link in the story into a new browser window and hit enter to come into the site with no referers.
Hope this helps
http://i29.tinypic.com/6h2vll.jpg
Data recovered from Seagate drive in Columbia shuttle disaster
posted on 06 May 2008 20:05
Most amazing disk data recovery ever
It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.
Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.
Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.
The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.
The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thinning.
It was a highly complex experiment needing prologed and detailed analysis of the data on the hard drive to discover the shear thinning effect. But it, like the drive, was eventually found. So ends a twenty-year research project and in doing so helps bring to a finish the dreadful story of the Columbia Space Shuttle mission.
[Chris Mellor, editor.]
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Now look what you've done. Wasn't it bad enough the shuttle burned up? Now you've gone and burned up the server trying to show us pictures of the mangled hard drive from the burned up shuttle.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I'm amazed that it's still in one piece and recognizable.
I've always been skeptical when a hard drive's specs mention being able to handle 300 g's. Looks like they aren't kidding.
Am I the only one who thinks that it's a little odd that they used a moving parts hard disk drive for such a paltry amount of data? (If it was solid state then it'd be a power of 2, not a round number). Surely even 2003stonauts could have managed to put together more than 400MBs in solid state, thus saving power, size and reliability?
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
You call THIS "recovered"??? More like "Houston,we have a problem ..."
/home/httpd/customtags/parameters.cfm: line 22
Error Executing Database Query.
Data source rejected establishment of connection, message from server: "Too many connections"
The error occurred in
20 :
21 :
22 :
23 : SELECT tag, value FROM parameters
24 :
SQL SELECT tag, value FROM parameters
DATASOURCE blocksandfiles
VENDORERRORCODE 1040
SQLSTATE 08004
Resources:
Check the ColdFusion documentation to verify that you are using the correct syntax.
Search the Knowledge Base to find a solution to your problem.
Browser Opera/9.23 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)
Remote Address 70.49.63.152
Referrer http://blocksandfiles.com/article/5056
Date/Time 07-May-08 07:30 PM
Stack Trace
at cfparameters2ecfm1715857017.runPage(/home/httpd/customtags/parameters.cfm:22) at cfApplication2ecfm1592932022.runPage(/home/httpd/vhosts/blocksandfiles.co.uk/sitedocs/Application.cfm:17)
com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.MySQLNonTransientConnectionException: Data source rejected establishment of connection, message from server: "Too many connections"
at com.mysql.jdbc.SQLError.createSQLException(SQLError.java:921)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.doHandshake(MysqlIO.java:1055)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.createNewIO(Connection.java:2749)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.(Connection.java:1553)
at com.mysql.jdbc.NonRegisteringDriver.connect(NonRegisteringDriver.java:285)
at coldfusion.server.j2ee.sql.pool.JDBCPool.createPhysicalConnection(JDBCPool.java:562)
at coldfusion.server.j2ee.sql.pool.ConnectionRunner$RunnableConnection.run(ConnectionRunner.java:67)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)
Kevin Smith on Prince
If this experiment was on Columbia, why is the image called "Challenger_drive.jpg"?
Challenger was many years earlier...
http://www.networkmirror.com/N132udsTg07EUt3b/blocksandfiles.com/article/5056.html
Kevin Smith on Prince
Here's the link: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss
The second photo on this link shows the inside of the drive:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss
(Link stolen from another post in this thread)
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
Here's an internal view of the drive: http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/400-MB-Seagate-Drive-Survives-the-Columbia-Space-Shuttle-Disaster-4.jpg
http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/BAA76AE9-F23C-1819-08D80B3BC4D83163_2.jpg
There we go
=Smidge=
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss Has a more robust site and the orig tale.
I'd say that's the part that makes this impressive. Re-entry is known to be pretty darn warm. And heat will scatter magnetic domains. Heat up a magnet - it's not a magnet anymore.
Either this HD was in the center of a ball of stuff and didn't get very hot, or Seagate has some seriously awesome engineering going on.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
For anyone curious about the actual experiment whose data was recovered:
... The measurements had a temperature resolution of 0.01 mK and were conducted in microgravity aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia to avoid the density stratification caused by Earth's gravity."
The abstract for the science experiment is at http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v77/e041116 (or in the table of contents issue is http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PLEEE8&Volume=77&Issue=4 ).
"We measured shear thinning, a viscosity decrease ordinarily associated with complex liquids, near the critical point of xenon. The data span a wide range of reduced shear rate
I'm somewhat amazed that a vehicle as well connected as the shuttle doesn't mirror its data to the ground controllers. In the event of a failure, an alternate copy of the data would exist and millions of dollars worth of experimental data wouldn't be at risk. On-track does however rock (Until you get the bill)!
Robert F. Berg, Michael R. Moldover, Minwu Yao, Gregory A. Zimmerli Shear thinning near the critical point of xenon, Phys. Rev. E 77, 041116 (2008) doi 10.1103/PhysRevE.77.041116.
In the article, they mention a bit about the data recovery: During the mission, the apparatus recorded 370 h of data, of which 85% were downlinked for real-time analysis. Fortunately, the hard disk drive was recovered from Columbia's debris in a condition that made 99% of the data available for analysis. Also quite interesting is an off-hand comment they make about the sample cell they used: Seven months after the Columbia disaster in 2003, the meniscus height was remeasured in the recovered sample cell... This suggests that in addition to getting the hard drive (and the data off the hard drive), the Columbia debris search also found the sample cell for their experiment, which allowed them to make some additional measurements for their data analysis. This is also quite impressive!
The data-recovery aspect is quite interesting. So is the fundamental science. They had to run the experiment in micro-gravity to eliminate the density stratification that occurs for any liquid or gas subject to gravity. Shear thinning is a well-established and fairly well-understood phenomena in "complex fluids" (e.g. mixtures of solvents and polymers, like paints, lubricants, etc.); but it is quite interesting to have measured the effect in a pure one-component atomic gas. It's hard to imagine a simpler fluid, and yet it exhibits this interesting viscosity effect!
I'm glad that this scientific experiment was salvaged from the otherwise tragic final mission of Challenger.
"Product warranty is void if any seal or label is removed, or if drive experiences shock in excess of 350 Gs"
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
I need a physics geek. Assume a 1kg weight, and assuming it was just "dropped" from 100,000 feet (that was roughly the altitude Columbia was at when things went sour), how fast would it have been going when it hit the ground? Obviously, this drive must have come down inside a much larger chunk of debris based on the shape it was in. I'm just wondering about how many G's it really took on impact.
My assumption is that the drive probably wasn't going all that fast (in comparison to the 13,000 mph it was moving at on initial re-entry) when it hit.
Of course, I wouldn't want to be standing under it when it hit the ground...
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Uh, 400 megabyte 3.5" hard drives in 1983? I don't think so...
At least the astronauts didn't die in vain. I mean, they didn't anyways since they all know there are risks, but recovering useful data from the drive adds maybe a tad more meaning to the loss.
The best way to protect a supposedly cleaned hard drive against someone later trying to read the data is this or this.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
There R probably a few drives in Calif* landfills, containing your underwear size from 1988, waiting to be recovered.
They were unfortunately unable to recover the exact percentage. :(
--
"Everything right is wrong again, just like in a long, long trailer." --They Might Be Giants
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt. (When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will
That "First post recovered !" business was really a debug string literal that crept in at one point.
The expected output was, or course "Hello, World".
We're obviously going to have to port some of this to Mono. Probably get a more impressive stack trace out of it, too: the line count that wimpy java business didn't even make double digits.
How weak is that?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Did anyone else notice that the drive got so hot that the head controller IC was completely de-soldered. Just goes to show that if you want a hard drive destroyed you should have it shredded.
http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/watch-en.htm
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Followed by
#dd if=dev/random of=dev/diskWorks for me
It's you! You are the one using Opera! ;-)
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
you've got balls, publishing your ip address on slashdot...
Don't forget that the lead time on space experiments can be years, and you need to use equipment that was rated for space use when you specced it out... not when it went up... which adds even more lead time. Read up on the shuttle computers some time to get an idea of how conservative they are.
And in this care it was a damn good thing: the higher the information density on the drive, the lower the chance of recovering the data... and they were right on the edge of the possible as it was.
Pfft. It's just one android.
I worked with hall-effect devices which we used to build tensiometers in the textiles industry. One of the problems we had was loss of sensitivity over time. The service lifetime of a unit was a year or so before it was returned to me for rebuild and recalibration. The reason was that the unit was used in an industrial setting with lots of vibration and noise. The magnets lost strength.
All I had to do in many cases was to swap in a new set of magnets (and send the old ones out to be remagnetized). Then there were the clients that would turn the current up to compensate for the demagnetizing. They sent theirs back for a smoke refill after the smoke got out.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.