NASA Probing Air Force Photos of Shuttle
By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer
SPACE CENTER, Houston - NASA (news - web sites) confirmed Friday that the agency has received photos taken by powerful military ground cameras of the disintegrating space shuttle Columbia as it streaked across the western United States.
Mike Kostelnik, a deputy associate NASA administrator, refused to identify where the ground camera was located, but he said it did take pictures at the time Columbia was experiencing a breakup of the left wing.
Kostelnik also said that ground searchers had recovered a large piece of one of Columbia's wings.
"It is not clear which wing this is," he said. "Obviously the structure is very important."
Although Kostelnik confirmed that NASA had received the military photos, he said it would be speculation to comment on what the photos show.
Aviation Week & Space Technology reported Friday that an Air Force tracking camera in the Southwest took photos of Columbia just a minute before the craft broke apart and that the images showed serious structural damage to the left wing near the fuselage. The publication quoted sources familiar with the shuttle investigation.
Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the Directed Energy Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, said high-resolution images were taken by military cameras in Hawaii and New Mexico.
"We took multiple images of Columbia from our facilities here and in Hawaii. The one in Hawaii took images of earlier passes," Garcia said.
The directorate, which oversees the Starfire telescope, has turned over all its information to NASA, he said. The Starfire telescope, which photographs satellites orbiting earth, can recognize features as small as 1 foot in length on a satellite 600 miles away, base officials said. |
