Meteorite 'may have hit shuttle'

[Seeker of Truth]

Source (http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_747632.html?menu=)


Meteorite 'may have hit shuttle'

Nasa says a small meteorite or piece of man-made space junk may have struck the Columbia shuttle causing it to crash.

Even a tiny scrap of debris grazing the shuttle could have damaged thermal tiles just enough to start a chain reaction.

The comments by Milt Heflin, the space agency's flight director, cast doubt on the lead theory that a piece of foam insulation damaged the craft during blast off.

"Did we take some hit? That's a possibility. Something was breached," he has told the Los Angeles Times.

William Ailor, president of Aerospace Corporation, said Nasa has had to adjust the flight path of shuttles at least eight times to avoid large pieces of debris.

A speck of paint once chipped the windshield of the Challenger during a mission completed before it exploded in 1986.

There are believed to be more than a million objects within 1,200 miles of the Earth's surface.


Story filed: 16:04 Wednesday 5th February 2003

[Greymon]

It could have been anything. I would like for us to have a definite answer so that we could have closure to all of this, but we may never know for sure what caused it.

As hard as it may be for us to accept this, we might have to.

[The_RANDy_Corporation]

Maybe it hit one of those "rods" the wacko's were all talking about a few months ago. The rod-shaped animals living in the air we haven't discovered officially.

Maybe it was the Keebler Elves, angered by years of oppression in the Old Oak Tree.

Maybe it was the negative Karma generated by the hawkish, evil United States' war machine.

Maybe it didn't break up at all because it never existed in the first place. The whole Shuttle program has been a Hollywood fiction, created to syphon money out of the budget secretly to fund a Presidential pleasure island only the Council on Foreign Relations nows about.

Maybe we should all take a deep breath and calm down and over the coming months empirically figger out what happened rather than chasing rabbits.

[PaulRevere]

Maybe it was Zeus throwing his thunderbolts around. He can be rather capricious, sometimes. Or maybe it was Gaia for the way that mankind, especially George Bush, is abusing earth.

Or maybe it was one of the angels getting in the way. Some of them are pretty clumsy now that they have been dumbed down under the leftist-inspired admission policies...

[Pennville_Bill]

"...........Maybe we should all take a deep breath and calm down and over the coming months empirically figger out what happened rather than chasing rabbits."

Good Advice. I agree. And if someone could tell the talking TV heads to STFU.

[Suzie]

Ooo Ooo can we start doing the what if's now too? Everybody Knows how much I love that! Here I will start, what if one of the spiders on board was really spider man and he is working for Saddam! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif

[**DONOTDELETE**]

I dont see what is so foolish in thinking that some space debris or some kind of electrical atmospheric discharged may have played a role here.

Why is that being lampooned as comparable to angels hitting it or Zeus?

[Keith J]

Especially now the information on the insulation change came out. Can you say red herring?

Sure, it was a small piece and damage from suc would be slight BUT had the seals for the main landing gear been comprimised, the temperature rise is explained...there are other consequences too...

The landing gear is actuated by a single-acting hydraulic system. If the temperature in the wheel well rose high enough, it could partially extend the landing gear and partially open the door. With the gear down, there was no hope. No retraction possible as its one-way in hydraulics.

[Dash_Riprock]

All of this is a variation of the instant gratification theme. In this case, everyone wants an instant explanation.

It is obviously going to take some time to discern the cause, assuming it can be determined at all. Who knows, perhaps it was the insulation foam that caused it, or defective tiles, or space debris, or a secret SDI laser platform, or an attack by The Thing from Uranus...we just don't know at this point.

It is also true that many theories will prove to be unverifiable.

[PaulRevere]

[ QUOTE ]
Why is that being lampooned as comparable to angels hitting it or Zeus?

[/ QUOTE ]
Maybe I don't know much about space and the upper atmosphere, but the way I understand it is that space junk in floating in geocentric orbit. Maybe I'm wrong, but 200,000 feet up is well within the earth's gravity, so anything with any weight to it would be also falling towards earth. Thus, the odds that Columbia would hit another falling object large enough to destroy it is quite insignificant.

[Keith J]

If it were space junk, it would have to be moving on a direct closing vector. Remember, the shuttle was decaying in orbit and as such, is in a quasi-orbit/free-fall

The angle of attack makes it possible that a piece of space junk could have caused the damage but the region of "space" the shuttle is in when it is "belly-first" is quite clean of junk.

[Keith J]

[ QUOTE ]
Keith J said:
Especially now the information on the insulation change came out. Can you say red herring?

Sure, it was a small piece and damage from suc would be slight BUT had the seals for the main landing gear been comprimised, the temperature rise is explained...there are other consequences too...

The landing gear is actuated by a single-acting hydraulic system. If the temperature in the wheel well rose high enough, it could partially extend the landing gear and partially open the door. With the gear down, there was no hope. No retraction possible as its one-way in hydraulics.

[/ QUOTE ] Internal memos confirm my suspicions... (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/nasaemail4.html)