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Finding shuttle pieces a colossal task

Search covers area 560 kilometres long by unknown width in accident probe barely under way

By STEPHEN STRAUSS


Saturday, February 8, 2003 � Print Edition, Page A18

A clich� is not enough to describe the undertaking NASA investigators face in piecing together the remnants of the space shuttle Columbia to determine what caused it to disintegrate.

"It isn't like looking for a needle in a haystack; it's like looking for a needle in a hayfield or maybe a prairie," said Ron Schleede, former deputy director of the office of aviation safety for the U.S. National Airline Safety Board.

The search area for debris from Swissair Flight 111 off Peggys Cove, N.S., was 70 metres by 30 metres. Over a period of a year, investigators pulled up more than two million pieces of the plane.

Just over 12,000 pieces of Columbia have been found.

On all-terrain vehicles, horseback and on foot, hundreds of teams are scouring the main search area, 560 kilometres long and nobody knows how wide, in Texas and Louisiana. Shuttle remnants are being found everywhere.

A round object the size of a large globe was discovered in forest pine needles; the nose cone was found in a thicket; a large piece of a wing turned up yesterday, and divers were searching a pond.

Finding as many pieces as possible is the key; knowing what happened means putting the pieces of physical evidence together. Everything must be methodically sorted.

Bill Tucker, former director of general investigations with Canada's Transportation Safety Board, said that selectively cataloguing debris was vital to knowing why Swiss Air Flight 111 went down.

For the Columbia investigation, this translates into objects that might be connected with early theories of the crash; heat-shielding tiles, left wing bits and wheel and tire parts will be numbered and stored. Bits deemed less vital -- the shuttle seats, for example -- will be stored by category.

Then will begin the laborious task of determining whether there are indications of unusual damage on the retrieved objects that might relate to the accident. Any finding would be the "red flag" to which space-shuttle director Ron Dittemore of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has made repeated references.

When various red-flag objects are gathered together, the "forensic engineers" will put the pieces back together, Mr. Dittemore said.

Because of the shuttle's complexity, reconstruction likely will employ computer simulations to create sequences of events that would account for the damage seen in the evidence. Alternating between the evidence and computer modelling would create "fault branches." "Think of it as a probability diagram: If this could happen, then could this happen? And if that happened, could it lead to this?" Mr. Tucker said.

To do this effectively, as much debris as possible must be retrieved from what Mr. Tucker and Mr. Schleede describe as the "largest ever" debris field in aviation history.

The extent of the search presents potential problems. What if only a fraction of the debris is found? The likelihood of that is increased by reports that the shuttle may have started to break apart over California. "That will certainly increase the difficulty of the investigation," Mr. Schleede said.

Previous disaster investigations illustrate that finding key elements can be attributed as much to luck as to skill. But even with all the physical evidence and all the computer simulations, sometimes investigators cannot pinpoint the single flaw leading to a disaster.

Such a result could be a loss of public confidence in NASA. "The public's natural reaction [after Challenger] was: Did you find the cause and have you fixed it?" Mr. Tucker said, referring to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

"[With Columbia], we may not find an exact cause because there may not be an exact cause."

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