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Object separated from Columbia in spaceNASA studying flight records for clues
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- On the second day of the shuttle Columbia's flight, a small object separated from it, NASA has learned, and officials are investigating whether it provides a clue to what caused the shuttle's disintegration upon re-entry. An Air Force tracking station captured images of the object separating from the shuttle at 5 miles per second January 17, a NASA spokesman said. The agency is checking the data against a record of flight activities to see whether it was something routine like a water dump or whether the crew or onboard computers reported anything unusual at the time the object separated. One possibility is that the object struck the shuttle and then moved away from it. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe told CNN on Sunday that officials are probing whether at some point during the Columbia's voyage -- not just the moment captured in the Air Force images -- space debris or a meteoroid might have struck the shuttle, causing fatal damage. "That's certainly a possibility," O'Keefe said. "There's an awful lot of imagery that's coming forward now, both from other government sources as well as some private. ... We're examining everything and anything that's coming to us, to try to get some clue." Nothing is being ruled out, he said. "We're trying to let the facts guide us in the direction and have the [independent] Accident Investigation Board help us reach conclusions of what could have caused this. So nothing's off the table at this point." Board will look at cost-cut reportO'Keefe also said the board will look into reports that cost cuts during the past decade might have endangered the space program and its astronauts. An article in Sunday's editions of The New York Times describes years of deep budget cuts and layoffs of skilled NASA employees that might have compromised space endeavors. According to the article, space experts wrote a series of reports after the Columbia experienced several malfunctions in July 1999 during a mission to deploy a powerful X-ray telescope. "I think the Accident Investigation Board will certainly be examining all the past history, in terms of the safety record" and other factors, O'Keefe said, adding that NASA "will be guided by their findings and proceed accordingly." The board is led by retired Adm. Harold Gehman, who headed the probe of the attack on the USS Cole. It includes experts from the Air Force, Transportation Department and Federal Aviation Administration. Meanwhile, officials began taking pieces of Columbia -- some 20 feet long, others measured in inches -- to a hangar at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, where specialists will study them, O'Keefe said. "How much we're actually going to be able to reconstruct is something we'll know once we get all the pieces together," he said. "There's certainly no way we're going to be able to [totally] reconstruct it. The pieces are just absolutely mangled." The disaster occurred shortly after the shuttle experienced high heat and air resistance on its left side and wing. An early suspicion has been the possibility that a piece of foam from the shuttle's external fuel tank struck and damaged the heat-insulation tiles on the shuttle's left wing during launch. O'Keefe said the foam debris will be studied closely, along with any recovered tiles and photographs of the disaster. More than 1,000 pieces of debris recoveredMore than 1,000 pieces of debris recovered by an army of volunteers and government workers have been sitting at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the regional command center in Lufkin, Texas, and the Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, Texas. Search teams headed out again Sunday in Louisiana and Texas, where it was rainy and wet, said James Shebl, a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman in Lufkin. Shebl said the weather continued to prevent divers from searching the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas-Louisiana state line for a car-sized chunk that witnesses said they saw fall there.
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