User:Kalpanarana

COLUMBIA DISASTER Columbia was the first shuttle to reach space in 1981. It carried dozens of astronauts to space for the next 2 decades. It got disintegrated on its 28th mission. Most of the people still do not know what caused the disaster.

Columbia, on mission STS-107 left earth for the last time on Jan 16, 2003. The seven member crew- Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, William McCool, Ilan Ramon spent 24 hours a day doing science experiments in two shifts. They performed about 80 experiments in life sciences, material science, fluid physics and other matters.

During the crew's 16 days in space, NASA was investigating a foam strike during launch. About 82 second after Columbia left the ground, a piece of foam fell from the external of the shuttle on the spacecraft's wing.

On Feb 1, 2003, the shuttle made its usual landing approach to Kennedy Space Center. Just before 9 a.m. EST, however abnormal readings showed up at Mission Control. They lost temperature readings from sensors located on the left wing. Then, the tire pressure readings from the left side also vanished..

A spacecraft communicator called up Columbia to discuss the tire pressure readings. At 8:59:32 a.m., Husband called back from Columbia: "Roger", followed by a word that was cut mid-sentence. At that point Columbia was near Dallas, travelling 18 times the speed of sound and at 61,170 metres from the ground. Mission Control made several attempts to get in touch with the astronauts with no success.

Twelve minutes later, when Columbia should have been making its final approach to the runway, a television network was showing a video of the shuttle breaking up in the sky. take a look at the footage through the link provided below.



The space shuttle on Feb 1, 2003 disintegrated upon reentering earth's atmosphere, killing all the seven crew members. The piece of foam fell from the shuttles's external tank to the left wing of the orbiter. When Columbia re-entered the atmosphere of earth, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate and destroy the internal wing structure which caused the spacecraft to become unstable and break apart. the shuttle broke apart over Texas. The search for debris took weeks, as it was shed over a field of some 2000 square miles in east Texas alone. NASA eventually recovered 84000 pieces representing nearly 40% of Columbia. Among them were crew members, which were identified with DNA. The cause was simple- friction by air.

The Columbia disaster was the second major tragedy in the history of the space shuttle program after the space shuttle Challenger broke apart shortly after launch on January 28, 1986, and all seven astronauts on board perished.

It was a tragic day for the NASA family, for the families of the astronauts who flew on STS-107 and likewise a tragic for the nation.