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Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., Studies Safer Space Shuttle Flights

Posted on: Friday, 17 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

Sep. 17--HAMPTON, Va. -- In the year and a half since the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew, researchers at Langley Research Center have learned a lot.

Through modeling, simulation and computation, they believe they have found ways to make shuttle flights safer. While not all of their findings will be considered for the next shuttle launch, which still is slated for March, they say they hope to contribute what they know to future flights.

About 80 employees at Langley have been asked by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to work on the problems that brought Columbia down. Namely, they want to know how much of an impact the shuttle's wing can take and still re-enter the earth's orbit and land safely.

They know that a piece of foam broke off the fuel tank 80 seconds after launch and hit the shuttle's wing at 500 miles per hour. The astronauts could not tell how big the hole was and had no way to patch it while in space. The damaged panel heated up upon re-entry, and the shuttle broke apart.

Researcher Edwin Fasanella studies the tape of the foam hitting the wing over and over again. He hopes to develop a computer program that can predict the amount of damage a piece of foam can cause based on the size of the foam and how fast it's going.

"We don't know exactly what happened," said Fasanella, group leader of the Return to Flight Impact Test and Analysis Team. "But this shows what can happen."

While Fasanella's lab is reconstructing the impact of foam on the wing, a team lead by Mia Siochi is trying to come up with a material that astronauts can use to patch holes in the shuttle's body while in space.

Researchers test the "goop" in a vacuum-sealed, 1,000-ton chamber that mimics the zero-gravity of space. With a device that acts like a caulking gun, they fill a hole in a piece of shuttle protection foam with the material. They then torch it to see if it can withstand the heat of re-entry.

"You don't want to find out up there that it doesn't work," Siochi said.

Over at the Non-Destructive Evaluation Sciences lab, they are developing a camera that uses infrared technology to identify cracks and holes in the wing which can't be seen by the naked eye. Down the hall, researchers are developing an ultrasound technology that can determine the length and depth of a crack in the hydrogen tank liners that is too small too see.

And in Langley's Mach 10 wind tunnel, scientists are measuring how much heat a hole in the shuttle's surface would generate. A hole can disrupt the aerodynamics of the shuttle so much that the affected area can heat up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit upon re-entering the earth's atmosphere.

NASA officials suspect that is what happened with Columbia.

"Three days after the accident, we were in the wind tunnel," said aerothermodynamics engineer Thomas Horvath.

The findings are distributed to the nine other NASA field centers, and officials are using this information to decide whether it will be safe to launch in March.

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