Marc Flemming
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A digital videotape that shows activities aboard the space shuttle Columbia as it re-entered the atmosphere will be released Friday afternoon, according to NASA.
The partially scorched and burned videotape was recovered near Palestine, Texas, during a search for shuttle debris, the U.S. space agency announced earlier this week.
The videotape runs about 13 minutes long, but stops short of the time when the orbiter broke up over Texas, killing the crew of seven.
No problems or anomalies were seen on the tape, accident investigators said.
Shot from the flight deck, it shows the back of the helmets of some astronauts as well as the view outside the window, where super-hot gases built up around the outside of the shuttle as it plunged into the atmosphere.
The buildup of the so-called plasma gas is a normal occurrence during atmospheric re-entry.
But a suspected breach in the left wing may have allowed enough gas in to lead to the destruction of the craft nearly 40 miles over Texas.
The video was shot with a small camera mounted near shuttle pilot Will McCool, who removes it and hands it to mission specialist Laurel Clark for additional taping, NASA said.
Normal conversations among other crew members can be heard as well.
The video begins when the $2 billion spacecraft passed over the south central Pacific Ocean at an altitude of about 95 miles and ends when it was over the eastern Pacific, southwest of San Francisco.
It includes nine minutes before and four minutes after re-entry, and ends about 11 minutes before Mission Control lost the signal from the doomed orbiter, accident investigators said.
Source: CNN
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02-28-2003 05:28 PM
