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Columbia was the first orbiter, and it had a unique flight data OEX (Orbiter EXperiments) recorder to record vehicle performance data during the test flights. The recorder was left in Columbia after the initial Shuttle test-flights were completed, and began recording information 15 minutes prior to reentry. The tape it recorded to was broken at ...
The heat of re-entry was free to spread into the damaged portion of the orbiter, ultimately causing its disintegration and the death of all seven astronauts. The accident triggered a 7-month investigation and a search for debris, and over 85,000 pieces were collected throughout the initial investigation. [ 6 ]
Columbia: The Tragic Loss is a 2004 documentary film about the first Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died in 2003 when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. Two months after the disaster, Ramon's diary was found at one of the crash sites and was reconstructed by the Israel Museum along with Israeli police.
William Cameron "Willie" McCool (born William Cameron Graham September 23, 1961 – February 1, 2003) was an American naval officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, and NASA astronaut, who was the pilot of Space Shuttle Columbia mission STS-107.
A post-flight analysis [11] identified that a gap filler was the likely cause of the high temperatures observed during this re-entry. Protruding gap fillers were also seen on STS-73 . A further in-flight repair was considered to remove or clip a damaged thermal blanket located beneath the commander's window on the port side of the orbiter.
One other minor modification that debuted on STS-28 was the move of Columbia's name from its payload bay doors to the fuselage, allowing the orbiter to be easily recognized while in orbit. Columbia landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, at 9:37:08 a.m. EDT on August 13, 1989, after a mission lasting 5 days, 1 hour and 8 seconds. Because ...
STS-109 (SM3B) was a Space Shuttle mission that launched from the Kennedy Space Center on 1 March 2002. It was the 108th mission of the Space Shuttle program, [1] the 27th flight of the orbiter Columbia [1] and the fourth servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope. [2]
The original American sphere-cone aeroshell was the Mk-2 RV (reentry vehicle), which was developed in 1955 by the General Electric Corp. The Mk-2's design was derived from blunt-body theory and used a radiatively cooled thermal protection system (TPS) based upon a metallic heat shield (the different TPS types are later described in this article).