My thoughts are of course like those of others with the terrible loss of the seven STS-107 crew members and Space Shuttle Columbia, and the impact on the families and all of the thousands of people who work to make human spaceflight possible. Such a tragedy. >all aspects of the re-entry have been described as >perfect until seven minutes to complete disintegration This is just to note that at 12,500 mph (20,000 kph), the vehicle would travel 1,458.3 miles (3,888.9 km) in seven minutes. Of course it was traveling faster than that at the beginning of the seven-minute period. So this would seem to stretch backwards in the timeline from Texas back to California at least. I have heard that fragments have been found as far east as somewhere near Baton Rouge, Louisiana -- presumably some of the densest and/or most heat-resistant pieces. Perhaps as a sort of confirmation of that, some of the weather radar images seem to show the trail extending well into Louisiana. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Feb 01 2003 - 18:40:19 EST