Maui telescopes Air Force telescopes on Haleakala may be able to provide crucial clues in the investigation into what caused the space shuttle Columbia to break apart on its landing approach yesterday. The telescopes, part of the Maui Space Surveillance Complex, took images of Columbia as it passed over Maui during the mission. Those images are now being sent to NASA as part of the investigation into the Columbia tragedy.
may offer clues
to tragedy
Images taken from atop Haleakala
Isles share in mourning tragedy
could reveal damage to the
shuttle's left wing
'Columbia is lost,' Bush tells nation
Dreams and drive unite Magnificent 7
By Leila Fujimori
lfujimori@starbulletin.comThe Air Force's telescopes routinely take a series of images of the space shuttle as it flies over the Pacific Ocean. The pictures of Columbia were taken beginning about five days after its launch, said Lt. Col. Jeffrey McCann, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory atop Haleakala.
"We were not looking for anything specific," he said. No images, he said, were taken yesterday morning at the time of re-entry when the accident happened.
"We will be transferring (the data) to NASA in a matter of a day or so," McCann said. "We contacted NASA to let them know we collected some data and we will be sending it to them."
PHOTO COURTESY R.A. FUJIMORI-GODDEN
A photo of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia was left with a lei in the Ellison Onizuka Museum in Kailua-Kona yesterday after the shuttle accident.McCann said he has not seen the images, so he does not know if they will show details of whether the shuttle's left wing or heat-resistant tiles were damaged when a piece of insulating foam from the external fuel tank hit the Columbia shortly after liftoff 16 days ago.
But high-quality images from the 1.6-meter telescope were used to look at damage to the drag chute compartment of the space shuttle Discovery in 1998 during the flight that carried former astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn into orbit.
"At that time we were contacted by NASA to take images," McCann said. The images were taken while the shuttle was in orbit and provided NASA enough detail to make safety decisions, he said.
Meanwhile, Oceanit, a research and engineering firm with offices next to the Air Force at the Maui Research and Technology Center, says it can help with the investigation if they are contacted.
The company's scientists have the ability to analyze video images of the Columbia as it disintegrated and provide valuable analysis of the data, said David Talent, Oceanit's senior scientist.
Talent said he and others in the company have background in image analysis, modeling, orbital debris and astrodynamics and astrophysics.
Oceanit is already working on a study of space debris for NASA.
However, Talent said the possibility of orbital debris playing a role in the Columbia accident is nil.
Talent said that if debris had hit the space shuttle, crew members probably would have noticed.
"It would be audible, like someone banging on the side of your house with a basketball," he said.
"The real danger of debris hits when several hundred kilometers or higher."
The U.S. flag flew at half staff at the State Capitol.
BACK TO TOP |
Dreams and drive They were from Texas, Wisconsin, Israel and India. Some had dreamed of going into space since they were children, inspired by television shows such as "Star Trek." The seven men and women who died aboard the space shuttle Columbia yesterday came from diverse backgrounds, with families on two continents and experiences in submarines, the Air Force and the circus.
unite Magnificent 7
The astronauts brought
Isles share in mourning tragedy
diverse backgrounds
to the ill-fated mission
'Columbia is lost,' Bush tells nation
Maui telescopes may offer clues to tragedy
Associated Press
"We trust the prayers of the nation will be with them and with their families," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said yesterday. "A more courageous group of people you could not have hoped to know."
In Spokane, Wash., where he grew up, Lt. Col. Michael Anderson was such a success story that the Rev. Happy Watkins would use a signed picture of the astronaut as a motivational tool when the clergyman spoke to young people.
"The kids can look at him and see he is black," said Watkins, Anderson's former Sunday school teacher.
Payload commander Anderson was teaching pilots how to fly refueling aircraft at an Air Force Base in New York when NASA chose him as one of only a handful of black astronauts.
The son of an Air Force man, Anderson, 43, was born in Plattsburgh, grew up on military bases but considered Spokane his hometown.
In 1998, Anderson traveled to Russia's Mir space station aboard the shuttle Endeavour. On the Columbia mission, the lieutenant colonel was in charge of dozens of science experiments.
David M. Brown was a varsity gymnast at the College of William and Mary in Virginia when he got a phone call: Would he like to join the circus? So during the summer of 1976, he was an acrobat, tumbler, stilt walker and unicycle rider.
Brown's interest in science and technology dated to high school, when he used a short-wave radio to communicate with a friend in Russia.
A Navy pilot and a physician, Brown received his undergraduate biology degree from William and Mary in 1978 and earned his medical degree from Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk in 1982. He joined the Navy after his medical internship and went on to fly the A-6E Intruder and FA-18 Hornet.
NASA chose him as an astronaut in 1996. Brown, 46, soared into orbit on Jan. 16 with a flag from Yorktown High in Arlington, Va., his alma mater, that another graduate took up Mount Everest.
When Kalpana Chawla emigrated to the United States from India in the 1980s, she wanted to design aircraft. The space program was the furthest thing from her mind.
"That would be too far-fetched," the 41-year-old engineer said in an interview earlier this year. But "one thing led to another" and she was chosen as an astronaut in 1994 after working at NASA's Ames Research Center and Overset Methods Inc. in California.
Chawla was the first India native to fly on a space shuttle but the second in space, after Rakesh Sharma, who flew on an Indo-Soviet mission in 1984.
Chawla enjoyed flying aerobatics and tail-wheel airplanes.
On her only other spaceflight, in 1997, she made mistakes that sent a science satellite tumbling out of control. Other astronauts had to go on a spacewalk to capture it.
Laurel Clark was a diving medical officer aboard submarines and then a flight surgeon before she became an astronaut in 1996. She had been on board Columbia to help with more than 80 science experiments. The 41-year-old was married with an 8-year-old son and lived in Racine, Wis.
Clark joined the Navy to pay her way through medical school and begin looking toward the space program as her military career drew to a close. She joined NASA in 1996 and earned a flight assignment after two years.
Four days before he was killed aboard space shuttle Columbia, Col. Rick Husband took a moment of silence to remember the astronauts who died in previous space disasters.
"It is today that we remember and honor the crews of Apollo 1 and Challenger," the shuttle commander said on Tuesday, the 17th anniversary of the Challenger explosion.
The 45-year-old Air Force colonel, a test pilot before he was selected as an astronaut in 1994, was on his second spaceflight. He piloted the Discovery shuttle for 10 days in 1999 on a mission that involved the crew's first docking aboard an international space station.
Husband studied at Texas Tech University and earned his master's degree in 1990 from California State University in Fresno. He took a red Bulldog sweatshirt into space with him and planned to present it to the school in April.
William C. McCool was an experienced Navy pilot with more than 2,800 hours in flight. But two weeks into his first trip into space, he was bursting with amazement.
"There is so much more than what I ever expected," McCool , 41, told National Public Radio on Jan. 30 from the space shuttle Columbia.
McCool, 41, grew up building model airplanes in Lubbock, Texas, and followed in his father's footsteps as a naval aviator. Known as "Cool Willie" in high school, he ran for the Coronado Mustangs and had taken a school spirit towel on the Columbia shuttle.
An Eagle Scout, he graduated second in his class in 1983 from the U.S. Naval Academy. He went onto test-pilot school, with assignments in Patuxent River, Md., and deployment aboard aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean Sea. He became an astronaut in 1996. His mission aboard the Columbia was his first spaceflight.
He was married with three sons aged 14 to 22.
Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, knew he was carrying the hopes of an entire people into space.
The 48-year-old Israeli air force colonel carried a microfiche of the Bible given him by his country's president, a tiny Torah scroll given to a Holocaust survivor at a Nazi concentration camp and a small pencil drawing titled "Moon Landscape" by a boy killed at the Auschwitz camp.
Ramon, the son of a Holocaust survivor, was not particularly religious but decided to eat kosher food in orbit.
NASA selected Ramon in 1997 to be a payload specialist. Along with his family, he had been living in Texas for several years as he prepared for the flight.
His presence on the shuttle following 28 months of fighting between Israel and Palestinians, led to increased security surrounding the flight.
