Shuttle Columbia Flight Recorder Recovered In Texas

ctar writes "ABC News reports that the space shuttle Columbia's flight recorder has been found in Hemphill Texas. ABC says: "The finding today came after NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said investigators may never find a single definitive cause for the destruction of Columbia""

Clues

[c4tp's friend]

Hopefully this will solve the problem resolutely.

Grow up

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a found a week or so ago and its identity confirmed today.

Good.

[HaloZero]

Perhaps today is not in vain. *hopeful*

A slashdot strategy...

[stefanlasiewski]

While this is interestng news, it's pretty untimely.

My guess is that the Slashdot editors are using this article to push the Iraq debate one topic lower, and hopefully reduce the traffic...

1 hour, 900 posts. Holy crap.

News for Norms. Stuff that is generic.

[Lshmael]

I always find it interesting how many more comments appear on articles that have nothing to do with science, but still have some kind of generic American appeal. Considering the current time on the East coast (just after midnight), it will be interesting to see how many posts it has a couple of days from now.

Re:A slashdot strategy...

[bigsteve@dstc]

Hey, I've noticed that the Iraq war hasn't caused any drop-off in SPAM either. Perhaps other things are happening in the world? Shock! Horror!

Better article

[Erect Horsecock]

Here [sfgate.com] More information than the press blurb in the article

How in the heck is this a troll???

[MarkusQ]

I fail to see why this [slashdot.org] was moderated troll [www.hack.gr].

Who was I supposed to be trolling? Are you saying that there are a large number of people reading /. that 1) are involved in the design of the space shuttle and 2) want to keep the system the way it is, so that more people will die, and that I'm therefore trolling them?

And can you give me an example of the "predictable responses" this is supposed to illicit?

Even if you meant it in the less common sense ("a troll is categorized by containing some assertion tha

Re:How in the heck is this a troll???

[MarkusQ]

I'll pretend you're serious, but I'm not doing to respond to any responses to this message.

I am serious damn it! I'm not asking you to pretend anything, just read to what I wrote instead of slapping a lable on it because it doesn't match your preconcieved notions.

A newborn baby must go on the next shuttle mission! 103 year old Grandma on a resperator is up next!

Newborn babies have to drive over bridges, as do 103 year old grandmothers. That's one of the main reasons bridges are as safe as they are

Conscription for safety?

[geoswan]

I'll pretend you're serious, but I'm not doing to respond to any responses to this message... A newborn baby must go on the next shuttle mission!

I am serious damn it! ...
Newborn babies have to drive over bridges, as do 103 year old grandmothers. That's one of the main reasons bridges are as safe as they are. If the mindset for designing bridges was that they only had to be useable by people in top physical condition, how safe do you think they'd be? If that seems to stretch the point too much, consider

Alternatives to conscription then

[MarkusQ]

Why did I bring up Szilard? His conscription program is unconventional, like MarkusQ's. But I think it held a lot more merit.

I would agree. He was, after all, a genius, as opposed to me, some random guy repeating (and quite likely misquoting) the best idea he's heard. It wasn't even my idea, just something I overheard in a bull session between some engineers (note the title of my original post).

So how can the idea be improved? Instead of a draft, have a lottery maybe? So you have to pay a buck for a

Probably doesn't mean much

[gravelpup]

The shuttle's recorder is pretty much redundant, since they send everything down in realtime anyway. It's unlikely that this will tell us anything new, IMHO.

Re:Probably doesn't mean much

[arb]

The shuttle's recorder is pretty much redundant, since they send everything down in realtime anyway. It's unlikely that this will tell us anything new, IMHO.

Except when the shuttle is tumbling all over the place and the antenna is not pointing anywhere near one of the receiving stations... The recorder could contain some information that it gathered while the shuttle was out of control. A large chunk of the "last 32 seconds" of data transmitted by the shuttle is missing and/or unusable. The recorder will hopefully be able to fill in the gaps there and maybe give some clues to what happened even later in the process.

Re:Probably doesn't mean much

[mcpheat]

According to the BBC [bbc.co.uk] it was the Orbiter Experiments Recorder that they found which was designed to provide data on Columbia's test flights. I'm surprised they didn't remove it when they last refurbished it to reduce weight.

OXE recorder

[dpilot]

I was skimming sci.space.shuttle last night. There had been a general "no flight recorders" statement about the shuttle by the more authoritative contributors to the group ever since this discussion on the launch began. Then this news came up.

It turns out that these flight recorders were done for Columbia and Challenger, and dropped from subsequent shuttles, since telemetry was deemed sufficiently reliable. Then everyone forgot about these OXE recorders, until one was found.

There was some mention about so

Re:Probably doesn't mean much

[plastik55]

Also, there is a very long period (about 16 minutes) during re-entry when radio communitation between the suttle and ground is impossible due to the ionization of the air around the shuttle at high speeds. Columbia broke up during the radio silence, so whatever information ground telemetry recieved wouldn't have been too useful.

RTA

[TitaniumFox]

The recorder, sources told ABCNEWS, starts 10 minutes before Columbia's descent and measures the ship's temperature, aerodynamic pressure and other data. The information would not have been transmitted to NASA mission control during the flight.

Emphasis mine...

Re:RTA

[sjames]

Especially during the communications blackout. There is a significant time period when radio comunications becomes impossible due to the envelope of plasma due to reentry heat that surrounds the shuttle.

Note to self

[0x0d0a]

Note to self: Check out what data recovery firm is doing work for NASA on the flight recorder. Keep in mind for any future problems. Anyone that can resurrect a recording device that's been blasted from an exploding spacecraft into the top of the atmosphere, subjected to incredible, rock-melting heat, and then slammed into the ground at terminal velocity can probably handle anything.

Re:Note to self

[bzcpcfj]

What is most remarkable is that the medium is TAPE. With all the improvements in storage technology, it's amazing that tape is still (apparently) the most effective means of reliably storing and recovering data in catastrophic situations. Of course, Galileo's tape system survived numerous passes through radiation fields that would have fried many systems, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

Re:Note to self

[Zapman]

If you're backing up serious data, tape is the only viable solution.

The technology is old. Or rather, mature. Most, if not all of the bugs have been worked out years ago. At work we have some LTO drives. IIRC, they can be written to at 20 mbytes/second, and they hold 60 gbytes uncompressed (and 120 using the hardware compression. Granted, this assumes the data isn't compressed already. Realisticly, you can only get about 80-90 GB per tape.). You can engineer tapes to be increadibly resiliant to almost anything. The only moving part in DLT or LTO tapes is a spindle that can be turned by the drive. The spool is unwound into the drive itself, and rewound back into the tape cartridge. There are also 2 spool designs with the 'read area' in the middle like cassette tapes. There are also tapes in the 100/200gb range, and the speed and size keeps increasing linearly.

What other medium's are out there?

1) CDROM/DVDROM Slow to write, and not much data. Good shelf life (20-30 years) though. Usually CD's are used for 'archival' purposes. AKA "The IRS decrees that this data must be kept for the next 15 years."

2) Flash? it's solid state, and no moving parts, but the write speed SUCKS for real data sizes. Also, the density just isn't there. IIRC flash cards top out at 512 mb now.

3) Hard disk? WAY to fragile. We moved a batch of 20 or so servers with about 2 TB of disk this weekend. We lost 7 disks (of around 150).

At this point, untill someone comes up with a remarkably new idea, tape will be the king of long term, high density data storage for the forseable future.

Re:Note to self

[rusty0101]

2) Flash? it's solid state, and no moving parts, but the write speed SUCKS for real data sizes. Also, the density just isn't there. IIRC flash cards top out at 512 mb now.

While I won't argue about write speed, Flash in cf format is becoming available in capacities of 4 Gig, see story at C|Net [com.com]. Doing ide raid with this would cover much of the speed barrier by distributing writes across many cards. It would also increase capacity.

How much data is going to be captured anyway. If it is a stream of values for several sensors sampled at 8khz, is doubtful to exceed the write speed of the current types of flash.

At the same time we are looking at hardware that is decades old....

-Rusty

Re:Note to self

[colenski]

Canadian military uses DLT's as flight recorders on their (few) f-18's. good enough for my purchase order.

Why is tape so good?

[dotgain]

The recording device can survive concussion and damage at most a few centimetres of tape, what was wound onto the take-up spool will probably be OK.

The engineering required to remove said tape and play it back on a different set of heads is much less complicated, touchy, and error-prone than that of say, a hard disk.

Attempts at falsifying / otherwise fudging the data would be more easily apparent, IMHO.

Because it's linear, concussion might be apparent in the recording, but it won't cause it go completely