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The Battalion
Page 5 • Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Ill-Fated Challenger mission remembered
Seventeen years after disaster, U.S. astronauts, space shuttle missions are safer
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By Johnathan Daugbjerg
THE BATTALION
Today marks the 17th anniversary of NASA’s ill-
fated 25th space shuttle launch, the Challenger.
Astronauts Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith
Resnick, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory
Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe were killed when the
Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift-off.
The cause of the disaster was attributed to a
failed rubber seal in the right solid rocket booster.
NASA Chief Roger Boisjoly said in a February
2002 visit to the A&M campus.
Questions were then raised about NASA’s sys
tem of checks and balances that allowed the orbiter
to fly that day. Boisjoly voiced his concerns about
the 1985 Challenger mission when tests showed
unsatisfactory - and unsafe — results, he said. The
1985 Challenger mission went on, however, despite
Boisjoly’s objections.
Boisjoly also said NASA recognized the ques
tionable safety of O-rings that might not seal well
due to the cold weather. NASA took the chance and
went ahead with the flight as scheduled.
“What you hear is not always what you want to
know,” Boisjoly said.
According to NASA’s official flight record, the
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Graphics courtesy of NASA
The crew of the ill-fated 1986 Challenger. Back row (from left to right): Ellison Onizuka, mission spe
cialist, Christa McAuliffe, payload specialist, Gregory Jarvis, payload specialist, Judith Resnik, mission
specialist. Front row (from left to right): Michael Smith, pilot, Francis Scobee, commander, Ronald
McNair, mission specialist.
first visible evidence of a problem occurred only 0.6
seconds into the flight when launch pad 39B cam
eras detected several dark plumes of smoke ,_****««■•*»
in the vicinity of the bottom field joint
of the right solid rocket booster
(SRB). Approximately 37 sec
onds into the flight, jM
Challenger encountered
heavy wind sheers as it pre- , v ' *
parcel to throttle its engines j j>
up to 100 percent. The first \
small flame escaped from n y
the right SRB’s O-ring seal
approximately 58 seconds after
launch. The shuttle’s telemetry —
data sent from the shuttle to mis
sion control in real-time — showed a
loss of pressure in the fuel tank,
suggesting a fuel leak.
According to the official analysis of
NASA’s flight video, flame breached the large,
orange external fuel tank 64 seconds after lift-off.
Eight seconds later, the lowest of the two struts link
ing the external tank and the right SRB failed,
allowing the booster to rotate on the remaining strut.
The SRB collided with the external tank, and the
resulting mixture of flame, liquid hydrogen, and liq
uid oxygen enveloped Challenger in a massive fire
ball that destroyed the shuttle and claimed the lives
of its crew.
A presidential commission was fonned in the
months following the disaster to review existing
data and determine why the accident happened. The
SRB’s joint failure was attributed to a design flaw in
the SRB’s O-ring assembly and air temperatures 15
degrees colder than any previous launch.
According to the commission’s report, one test
concluded that “a compressed O-ring at 75 degrees
Fahrenheit is five times more responsive in return
ing to its uncompressed shape than a cold O-ring at
30 degrees Fahrenheit.’’ Since a cold O-ring could
not easily return to its normal shape, tests conclud-
Kasparov beats chess supercomputer
ed that the ring was unable to seal properly, and the
joint was eventually eroded from the booster’s hot
combustion gases. This erosion caused
the joint to fail, allowing flames
from the SRB to escape and even
tually compromise the external
tank.
The commission also
pointed out several flaws in
the built-in flight safety sys
tem that allowed Challenger
to launch. SRB contractor
Thiokol’s management
initially opposed the
launch, but decided to
authorize it even though
engineers continued to
object, the commission reported.
“The unrelenting pressure to
meet the demands of an accelerating
flight schedule might have been adequately han
dled by NASA if it insisted upon the exactingly
thorough procedures that were its hallmark during
the Apollo program,” the commission said in its
report.
NASA and its contractors responded to the
Challenger disaster by making safety and risk miti
gation top priorities. NASA has flown 87 successful
missions since returning to shuttle flights in 1988
and is actively pursuing safety and performance
upgrades to the orbiter fleet that looks to keep the
space shuttle flying well into the 21st century.
On Jan. 21,2003, NASA announced the debut of
the Educator Astronaut Program, a program
designed to give educators the chance to fly on
future shuttle missions with the goal of cultivating a
new generation of scientists and engineers. NASA is
also pursuing its goal of the Teacher in Space
Program. Barbara Morgan, former teacher and
back-up astronaut to Christa McAuliffe on the failed
Challenger flight was assigned in December 2002,
to flight STS-118, according to NASA’s release.
NEWS IN BRIEF
By Madison J. Gray
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
World chess champion
Garry Kasparov defeated com
puterized challenger Deep
Junior on Sunday in the first of
six games pitting human wit
against computer logic.
Kasparov forced the Israeli-
programmed Deep Junior into
a position from which it could
notwin, compelling the human
moving its pieces to resign four
hours into the game.
Both players’ queens, the
most powerful pieces on the
board, were captured by the
end of the game, leaving them
to use less powerful knights,
bishops and rooks. That gave
the advantage to Kasparov,
who used white pieces and
moved first.
“Once he was able to
remove the queens from the
board, it was just arithmetic,”
said commentator and interna
tional grand master player
Maurice Ashley.
Early in the game. Deep
Junior stunned experts when it
paused for 25 minutes to con
template a countermove to
Kasparov’s attack. Kasparov
was able to parlay that into
dominance for the remainder of
the game, Ashley said.
“The entire time there was
no doubt of his superiority dur
ing the game,” Ashley said.
The game is the first in a
six-game series being played
through Feb. 7 in New York.
The second game is scheduled
for Tuesday.
The win is a coup for
Kasparov, who was beaten in
1997 by Deep Blue, an IBM
supercomputer capable of 200
million chess moves per sec
ond. Kasparov claimed humans
may have given hints to the
computer, which was disman
tled after the win.
Kasparov, 39, will be paid
$500,000 by the World Chess
Federation, the game’s interna
tional governing body, for
playing Deep Junior, which has
not lost a match to a human
opponent in two years. He can
earn an additional $300,000 if
he wins the six-game match.
Deep Junior is a three-time
world champion and won the
last official world chess cham
pionship for computers in July.
It is capable of processing only
3 million moves per second,
but its programmers say it
focuses more on strategy than
on capturing the opponent’s
chess pieces quickly, as other
programs do.
Heart disease tests
look to bloodstream
(AP) — New guidelines
issued Monday urge doctors to
consider testing millions of
Americans at moderate risk of
heart disease for signs of inflam
mation in the bloodstream — a
newly recognized cause of heart
attacks.
Evidence has been building
for several years that painless
inflammation is a major trigger
of heart trouble, worse even than
high cholesterol. But until now,
doctors have been unsure how
and when to look for the condi
tion, which can be measured
with a simple blood test.
The new recommendations,
drawn up by the American Heart
Association and the Centers for
Disease Control and
Prevention, are the first to pro
pose an important role for
inflammation testing.
Twin Mars rovers on
track, set for mission
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) —
NASA is readying identical twin
rovers for a mission to Mars,
where the six-wheeled buggies
will prospect for geologic evi
dence that the Red Planet was
once wet enough to support life.
Engineers at the space
agency’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory are scrambling to
finish assembling and testing the
two rovers for launch on sepa
rate rockets in May and June.
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