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Space Tech

NASA says foam likely not cause of shuttle disaster

REUTERS, cAPE cANAVERAL
NASA on Wednesday all but ruled out that the shuttle Columbia disaster was
caused by foam debris that broke off the fuel tank at liftoff, saying the insulation was not heavy enough or traveling fast enough to seriously damage the spacecraft.
As NASA continued its search for clues to what caused the oldest shuttle to disintegrate over Texas on Saturday, the remains of the astronauts that have been recovered in a massive search in Texas arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where forensics experts will try to identify them.
At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore told a news conference the piece of foam that broke off the external fuel tank shortly after liftoff was about 2-1/2 pounds and was moving about 750 feet per second, neither heavy enough nor fast enough to damage the shuttle's heat-resistant tiles.
"We're focusing our attention on what we didn't see. We believe there was something else," Dittemore told reporters. "There's got to be another reason."
Dittemore said the foam insulation, which coats the large, orange tank beneath the orbiter at launch, was impervious to moisture. Reports have suggested the foam may have become waterlogged and that the water turned to ice.
"There is a missing link," Dittemore said. "Right now it just does not make sense to us that a piece of debris would have been the root cause for the loss of Columbia and its crew."
Although NASA is considering such possibilities as a meteoroid impact or collision with floating space junk while Columbia was in orbit, the agency still focused on some launch-related event as a likely cause of the event.
Near the Kennedy Space Center, workers have scoured the beaches Columbia flew over to see if anything fell off the shuttle and landed there. They are also studying ocean currents and testing whether various parts float.
A NASA spokesman said anything that fell from the orbiter might have been caught in the Gulf Stream and be headed north in the Atlantic.
The search for debris from Columbia's crash widened into California and Arizona, where parts may have fallen away before NASA lost contact with the shuttle over Texas.
Shuttle pieces were streaming into collection sites at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas.
Workers cut a swathe into a scarred parcel of East Texas pine forest to recover the nose cone while workers located a wing section from the craft about 60 miles away.
U.S. attorneys said two people had been indicted for stealing debris. A federal grand jury in Tyler, Texas, returned one-count indictments against Merrie Hipp, 43, of Henderson, Texas, and Bradley Justin Gaudet, 23, of Nacogdoches, said Matthew Orwig, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.
Hipp was charged with stealing a circuit board from the wreckage and Gaudet was charged with stealing thermal barrier fabric. If convicted, they could face up to 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.
At Dover Air Force Base, a chaplain recited an interfaith prayer over seven containers, six symbolically draped in American flags and a seventh in an Israeli flag, when they astronauts' remains arrived there. The shuttle had been carrying the first Israeli in space.
A military honor guard, serving as pall bearers, carried the containers to waiting hearses.
About 20 reservists have been called up to help with the task of identifying the astronauts through DNA samples, dental records and medical X-rays.
"We have forensic pathologists, forensic anthropologists, dentists, a team of mortuary specialists. But DNA, for example, takes time and that will probably be our primary source of identification," mortuary director William Zwicharowski said.