#Space shuttle columbia cockpit video software#
#Space shuttle columbia cockpit video windows#

'And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last,' astronaut Charles Hobaugh called up from Houston. Husband called down to mission control, presumably to ask about the tire pressure, but his transmission was cut off. 5 minutes and 45 seconds after that initial reading was stored in the data recorder - the first indication of trouble showed up in telemetry reaching flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston: a loss of temperature readings from hydraulic lines in Columbia's left wing.įour minutes later, Columbia's backup flight computer displayed a message in the cockpit indicating a loss of left main landing gear tire pressure readings.

#Space shuttle columbia cockpit video windows#

Using a hand-held video camera, astronaut Laurel Clark recorded the pink glow out Columbia's cockpit windows as the shuttle began encountering the heat of re-entry high above the Pacific Ocean. In any case, commander Rick Husband, pilot Willie McCool, mission specialists Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, David Brown and Israeli guest astronaut Ilan Ramon were unaware of any problems as they returned to Earth, marveling at the pink glow out the cockpit windows as atmospheric friction built up in the moments before that first unusual sensor reading.

Senior managers ruled out asking for spy satellite imagery that might, or might not, have allowed a more thorough analysis.

#Space shuttle columbia cockpit video software#

Three frames from a NASA tracking camera show foam separating from the shuttle Columbia's external tank (left), tumbling toward the left wing just under the orbiter's nose (center) and then emerging from under the wing as a cloud of debris.Įngineers could not determine exactly where the foam had hit, and Columbia was not equipped with a robot arm to enable an inspection in space.īut an engineering analysis based on software modeling for much smaller impacts indicated the foam strike did not pose a 'safety of flight' issue. Later analysis would show the foam impacted the underside of the left wing at a relative velocity of more than 500 mph, instantly disintegrating. Tracking cameras showed the foam disappearing under the shuttle's left wing and emerging an instant later as a cloud of fine particles. But 16 days earlier, 81.7 seconds after liftoff, a briefcase-size chunk of lightweight foam insulation had broken away from Columbia's external tank as the spacecraft accelerated through 1,500 mph.