posted 04-11-2012 11:48 AM
During the re-entry flight deck video of STS-107, out the left cockpit window, there are a series of flashes. Are these the forward RCS jets compensating for the drag on the left wing?
If so wouldn't Commander Husband have noticed the abnormal amount of course corrections that the RCS was being forced to make?
Jim Behling Member
Posts: 1463 From: Cape Canaveral, FL Registered: Mar 2010
posted 04-11-2012 01:54 PM
quote:Originally posted by Arthurlee: Are these the forward RCS jets compensating for the drag on the left wing?
FWD RCS do not operate during entry. The entry plasma is what is making the flashes.
Arthurlee New Member
Posts: From: Registered:
posted 04-11-2012 02:15 PM
Thanks for clarifying, Jim.
Glint Member
Posts: 1040 From: New Windsor, Maryland USA Registered: Jan 2004
posted 04-11-2012 02:57 PM
Same questions and answers are in this transcript:
STS-ICOM: Clark: "I'm getting the jets firing, I'm trying to see if I can get an overhead window view yet..."
08:43:47 a.m. - STS-ICOM: Clark: "Is that jets firing on the DAP, I guess."
08:43:58 a.m. - STS-ICOM: McCool: "That might be some plasma now."
STS-ICOM: Clark: "Think so, already?"
STS-ICOM: McCool: "Yeah, the jets are not firing right now."
Jay Chladek Member
Posts: 2272 From: Bellevue, NE, USA Registered: Aug 2007
posted 04-11-2012 05:03 PM
The video ended about 10 minutes before the breakup occurred. Damage to the tape caused the footage to begin to break up at the point where it ended and nobody is entirely sure if it was running when things began to go south. All things considered, it is near miraculous that any footage from a handheld cam-corder was even recovered in the first place.
The problems didn't really begin to manifest themselves until a few minutes later, but things were so subtle that the flight control computers didn't really indicate anything was wrong until right before the wing failed completely (when some of the RCS jets began firing to compensate for the wing distortion). There have been other videos shot of orbiters on reentry from the cabin and they show about the same thing in terms of the plasma flow. So at this point in the video, it was still a relatively normal reentry.
If you want to read more about what happened, you can download a PDF of the Columbia Crew Survivability report here.
It is 400 pages worth of the entire post-mortem on the breakup, the failures, how the crew probably died, and other ways they might have died with several timelines of events. Plus it shows how they came to these conclusions. It goes way more in depth than the accident investigation report did.
posted 04-11-2012 11:48 AM
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