[meteorite-list] The Greatest Search Operation - People Unite to Find Space Shuttle Columbia Debris

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon May 9 16:11:13 2005
Message-ID: <200505092010.j49KAeM22465_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.geoplace.com/uploads/featurearticle/0505dm.asp

The Greatest Search Operation
People Unite to Find Space Shuttle Columbia Debris
BY PHILIP CHIEN
Geo World
May 2005

A couple of hours after the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, NASA
Manager Bill Readdy cautioned, "If you find debris, do not touch it; do
not move it. Contact your local authorities. Authorities need to impound
the debris and secure the area." Concern about debris was serious,
because the shuttle, with poisonous propellants onboard, broke up over
populated areas.

Many in NASA wondered how the communities underneath Columbia's flight
path in Texas and Louisiana would react to the accident. They had no
connection to the space program, and these people could have been angry
that NASA was endangering their lives with poisonous materials.
Fortunately, they opened up their hearts and provided whatever was needed.

If anything good can be said about a disaster, it's that it brings out
the goodness in people. Trays of sandwiches would suddenly show up for
recovery teams. Spare bedrooms were made available. The most common
questions asked by residents in the area to search teams were "What do
you need?" and "What can I do to help?"

Immediate Action

The Humanities Urban Environmental Sciences GIS laboratory at Stephen F.
Austin State University took reports of where pieces were discovered and
put them into a GIS database. The lab quickly determined Columbia's
flight path as well as the "base vector" where most of the debris would
be found directly underneath. The lab's numbers were close to the values
calculated by NASA's engineers.

NASA's first priority was to find the bodies of the astronauts, if
possible. A day after the accident, NASA announced that remains from all
seven astronauts were found, but it had to retract that statement. The
actual information was just that human remains were found. Within a
couple of days, however, remains of all seven astronauts were found.

Columbia spread most of its debris in a 240-mile-long, 10-mile-wide
strip covering 47 Texas counties and seven Louisiana
parishes--equivalent in area to the state of Rhode Island. Initial
estimates predicted 20 percent or more of Columbia could have survived
re-entry and made it to the ground. But how could NASA find all the
pieces, with much of it in forests, swamps and other difficult-to-access
regions?

Unprecedented Operation

A call was put out for any government agencies or other organizations
that could help. And the help came--everything from trained
search-and-rescue teams to Boy Scout troops. A logical choice was the
Bureau of Land Management's firefighters, who are normally only hired
during the summer fire season. They're physical people experienced at
working outdoors, and those who didn't have other commitments during the
"offseason" could be hired to search for debris.

"The unprecedented debris-recovery operation involved more than 14,000
people representing more than 130 different agencies and volunteer
groups, contractors and private organizations, state and local
governments--you name it, everybody was involved," says Sean O'Keefe,
NASA administrator. "Well beyond the expectations of what we ever could
have imagined with that many disparate groups who had never worked
together before, this has proven to be, in my judgment, the greatest
inter-agency, inter-government, inter- personal activity we could have
conducted anywhere--any time. It has been absolutely flawless."

Each day there was an average of 5,600 people on foot in the field. The
search involved underwater divers, helicopters and, most important, a
lot of "shoe leather." A four-mile-wide strip was searched on the
surface. Helicopters were used over an additional three miles on each
side to try to spot larger lightweight items that could have been blown
off course by winds.

The searchers took a special pride in their tasks. Many wore T-shirts
bearing the motto "Their mission has become our mission." Each search
team consisted of about 20 firefighters and volunteers, three or four
people from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who checked debris
for potential hazards, and a NASA person to help identify debris in the
field.

GPS/GIS Use

As each piece of debris was found, its location was surveyed with a
Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. It was photographed in place
and, if possible, identified. The debris were transported to Barksdale
Air Force Base in Louisiana for cataloging and then shipped to Florida.
There, engineers "reassembled" Columbia like a jigsaw puzzle to
determine what was there, what was missing and how it was damaged during
the breakup.

The searchers had a hard deadline: the spring growing season would make
it far more difficult to spot pieces on the ground, and the firefighters
would only be available until May before they were needed for their
normal fire-season jobs.

A GIS database of the debris zone was laid out, and a schedule was
developed based on available resources--how much could be searched each
day and when the searches would have to end. The database also helped
show which areas had greater concentrations of debris and where pieces
from certain portions of Columbia ended up.

Based on where certain pieces were discovered, searchers were sent out
to reexamine some of the areas that were already searched to try to find
important components such as film cameras and engineering recorders in
the hopes that they might have survived. In one case, they were
successful. A data recorder was found in excellent condition that proved
to be a "gold mine" of engineering data for investigators.

Searchers' Passion

"People have a real deep appreciation for the human aspect of
spaceflight," notes John Herrington, astronaut. "You realize there's
huge support for flying humans in space from the general public. That,
if anything, makes you feel you're doing this for a reason. People
appreciate this--they realize what it means to them.

"I appreciate the fact that there were people going way beyond what was
expected to recover the crew and the hardware to figure out what
happened. You'll never have any idea, unless you're out in East Texas,
what a fabulous thing the people out there did. From the minute it
happened and debris started coming down in Texas, people came from
around the country to participate in the recovery. They did a phenomenal
job.

"I was really impressed with the people I met: Texas forestry service,
U.S. forest service, FEMA, EPA, you name it. It was really good coming
together with talented people doing really important things. That was a
beautiful example of what people in this country are capable of
doing--the federal government making something happen and doing
something totally unexpected and doing it well," says Herrington.

Lucky or Expected?

A major myth about the debris was the "miracle" that nobody was hurt or
killed. Many buildings were damaged, many witnesses saw pieces fall in
front of them and, in some cases, debris fell fairly close to where
people were located just minutes before. Why was NASA so lucky?

A little common sense says that it's not surprising at all. In fact, it
would have been extremely surprising if anyone was hit by a piece of
debris. The simple fact is that people are small, and buildings are
large. Although it's certainly fortunate that no one was injured, a
little math shows it was the expected result.

84,124 pieces of debris were recovered, ranging from tiny coin-size
pieces to a 400-pound, 12-foot-long piece of Columbia's bulkhead. The
average piece weighed about one pound.

An average of 35 debris pieces fell per square mile. In some areas,
there was a higher concentration of debris than in others. But even
assuming that every one of the 400,000 people under Columbia's flight
path was a large adult lying down outdoors, the odds of any person
getting hit was less than one in 41,000. And even if someone were hit by
a piece of debris, it wouldn't necessarily result in an injury. Getting
hit by a lightweight cloth patch that fell from a height of 38 miles is
identical to getting hit by a lightweight cloth patch falling from a
height of 10 feet.

So the odds of a person getting killed were extremely low. But there
were many reports about property damage and some "close calls" where
pieces fell where somebody was standing earlier as well as eyewitnesses
seeing pieces fall to the ground nearby.

Even if Columbia had broken up a couple of seconds earlier and fell over
Dallas-Fort Worth, one of the most populated cities in the United
States, the numbers would have been similar. Or if there were three
times as many pieces. It was certainly fortunate that no one was killed
by Columbia's debris, but it was hardly unexpected.

A Difficult Task

Statistics show how difficult it was to find debris--only 35 pieces per
square mile. That's why it took such an intense effort to find what was
recovered. The three-month, $302-million search was completed in early
May 2003.

"Thanks to the efforts we've had here in Lufkin and on the Texas
corridor and from more than 100 federal and state agencies, we've
recovered close to 40 percent of the shuttle," says David Whittle,
debris collection head. "It's a major recovery. It's about twice as much
as predicted that we would recover, and it's of critical importance to
the Columbia Accident Investigation Board."

"On February 1st, I stepped off the airplane at Barksdale Air Force Base
to start the first part of this search, what has turned out to be the
largest search of this nature in the history of the United States,
perhaps the world," notes Whittle.

The original estimate, based on the recovery of various satellites that
weren't intended to survive re-entry, was that NASA could recover about
20 percent of Columbia. But Columbia's thermal protection system
prevented many pieces from burning up, although it was pushed beyond its
limits.

Columbia also has some extremely cold materials such as tanks of liquid
hydrogen and oxygen and water that helped protect items from the intense
reentry heat and increased the chances they would survive. About 39
percent of Columbia was ultimately recovered. But the most important
reason so much was recovered was the intensive search.

"This has been the largest search in U.S. history in terms of a detailed
search operation," added Scott Wells, Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA). "We've had air, ground and water operations. We've had
ice storms, and I think we had 40 days and 40 nights of rain back in
February." (Only in Texas could you have 40 days and 40 nights of
anything in a 28-day month!)

More than 30,000 people participated in the search.

"We had people walking within 10 feet of each other on a 210-mile strip,
four miles wide, and they didn't miss very much," notes Whittle. "There
was an incredible amount of pride in finding things and being complete.
We physically covered on the ground, with people walking, more than
700,000 acres."

Wells provided a comparison: "Just the ground operation was the
equivalent of one person walking from the Earth to the moon, then seven
laps around the moon, then back to Earth and one lap around the Earth
and then still have two thousand more miles to go."

Continuing Collection

With such an intense search, it isn't surprising that other lost items
would be discovered. A body was found--a man who had wandered away from
a nursing care facility about a year before. Also found was a pickup
truck involved in a homicide investigation.

Most of the rest of the shuttle burned up, but some of it eluded the
searches. Pieces were too small, naturally camouflaged, fell in lakes
where they were hidden in the muddy bottoms, blown off the main search
corridor or otherwise missed.

Debris still continues to be found by accident, especially by
outdoorsmen who come across something in the woods or other areas rarely
visited by humans. Recovery teams have asked anyone who finds something
that they believe is a piece of Columbia to call 866-446-6603.

"Depending on the debris, if it's something small, there's a good chance
we'll just ask you to FedEx it," says Whittle. "If it turns out to be
something larger or toxic, someone will respond to it."

No one believes there are missing pieces with new clues or evidence of
why the accident occurred. All the evidence that was collected is
overwhelming and points to the same conclusion. But NASA still wants to
collect any remaining Columbia pieces because of the emotional
importance and to avoid any illegal sales.

As the pieces from Columbia were reconstructed, they told their story.
The debris clearly showed that the left wing was much more heavily
damaged than the right wing. Even missing pieces helped tell the story.
Much of the left wing was never found, because it burned up due to the
intense heat. Hal Gehman, accident board chief, acknowledged that "the
debris was more important than I thought it was going to be."

After an intense seven-month effort, the accident board released its
248-page report on Aug. 26, 2003. Corrections were made to prevent
anything similar from happening again, and improvements were made to
NASA's management structure. NASA is planning on resuming shuttle
missions in May 2005 if everything's ready.

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Editor's Note: Philip Chien's book, Columbia--Final Voyage--the last
flight of NASA's First Space Shuttle, about the Columbia astronauts and
their mission, will be published this summer by Copernicus Books. NASA's
report on the debris recovery can be downloaded and viewed at
www.caib.us/news/report/pdf/vol2/part10.pdf.

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Received on Mon 09 May 2005 04:10:40 PM PDT