Sunday, September 28, 2008

The Mystery Object May Be the Clue

Columbia, the space shuttle launched on January 16th, will remain a memoir to everyone after the disaster happened to the astronauts it was carrying. However, the investigations are still going on the tragedy. They figured a mystery object that was assumed to be detached from the left wing of the spacecraft, after 24 hours of its launch. It slowly entered into the earth’s lower orbit and burned up in the atmosphere over the South Pacific 3 days later. And investigators think this could be somehow related with crash of the spacecraft. The radar blip from the foot-long fragment was so weak that the space trackers did not even notice it during the flight. Only after Columbia was lost on Feb. 1 did they manually review the 3,000 raw records from their worldwide tracking network. It took five days to find the radar signature. The object might have something to tell to the investigators about the crash of the spacecraft and also about the inefficiency of NASA to have that identified only after losing the astronauts. However, they are still trying to argue that it was not their fault at all.

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