Hard Drive Recovered from "Columbia" Shuttle Solves Physics Problem

[krispos42]

Not bad at all... recoving data from a four-year-old hard drive dropped from a couple dozen miles up. And surviving re-entry, to boot!

Hard Drive Recovered from Columbia Shuttle Solves Physics Problem

An experiment that flew on the Columbia shuttle achieves closure
By JR Minkel

Researchers have finally published the results of data recovered from a cracked and singed hard drive that fell to Earth in the debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke up during reentry on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members.

The hard drive contained data from the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment, designed to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity. The findings, published this April in the journal Physical Review E, confirmed that when stirred vigorously, xenon exhibits a sudden change in viscosity known as shear thinning. The same effect allows whipped cream and ketchup to go from flowing smoothly like liquids to holding their shapes like solids.

<anip>

After the reentry, Berg says, when it was not immediately recovered, "we assumed that it fell out of the cage and burned up and that was it." But engineers from Johnson Space Center had actually found the apparatus in the hanger at Kennedy Space Center where workers had laid out the Columbia debris, says James Myers of the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the project's lead engineer.

When the Glenn engineers learned that the hard drive had indeed survived, they sent it to Ontrack Data Recovery in Minneapolis to extract whatever data remained in the cracked hard drive disk . The data came back about 99 percent complete, but the results were so complex that isolating the shear-thinning effect took an additional several years, Berg says.

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http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss

Let's hear it for forensic data recovery! :woohoo:

[ramapo]

1. Pretty impressive n/t

[Mabus]

2. We need to get that foresenics discovery team to work on the WH computers

to recover the data of the "missing" e-mails.

[soothsayer]

7. My thought exactly!

[merh]

3. so this tells me that if I want to destroy my hard drive

I need to run over it with a mac truck, break it into thousands of little bits and then burn it. x(

;) Pretty cool they were able to recover this. Did the shuttle crew get the credit on the published report?

[deadmessengers]

4. That's actually not far off from what I've seen done in the past.

At one military facility I've seen, secure hard drive & backup tape destruction is accomplished by first running them through a degausser, then driving a tank over the drives and tapes, then shoveling the bits into a ditch and dumping a hundred or so gallons of gasoline into the ditch and torching the whole thing. If that doesn't render data unrecoverable, I don't know what would.

[Occulus]

6. The degausser is a good idea, but the rest is a unnecessarily massive amount of work...

They could simply torch the thing with thermite and be done in seconds.

As an aside, if you do a YouTube search for "challenger disaster", you'll find 'rare footage' captured by an Apache helicopter during the breakup. I'd never seen that before...

[ohioINC]

5. Sounds expensive

I wonder how much government cash was spent to determine the viscocity of Xenon gas in space.

[caraher]

8. peanuts compared to what it burns in Iraq

and it doesn't turn the US into a global pariah, either. And I think it's a perfect legacy for the lost crew, even if it does cost some money.

Not that I can't think of better ways to spend money than on many shuttle experiments!

I'm sure the data recovery company will get a lot of business with this feather in their cap!

[uberllama42]

10. I have a friend who really hates the space program

She supported the war until about three years in. Go figure. I guess that's about what to expect from someone raised in a Republican household.

Shuttle missions wouldn't be my priority in world with so much disease and starvation, but at least they don't exacerbate the problem. I don't think most people understand the scope of what the U.S. has wrought in Iraq.

[TZ]

16. Actually they do some really interesting biology/physiology/disease research

In zero G. There is some thought that zero g applications might be therapeutic for some conditions. The idea that the experiments done up there have no practical applications is kind of a myth.

[Johonny]

9. 7 dead people

[arendt]

11. But nothing useful survived the four 911 crashes. Right. Tell me another. n/t

[TZ]

15. Space shuttle technology is a bit more sophisticated

than the technology in airplanes....:eyes:

[Tesha]

18. No, that's a perfectly-ordinary "COTS" disk drive with added shock-mounts.

COTS = Commercial Off-the-Shelf

In other words, the same stuff you and I could buy,
with some extra shock-hardening added on externally.

Tesha

[DireStrike]

12. practical applications?

Anyone have a clue? Isn't xenon a noble gas? Doesn't sound particularly useful.

[Posteritatis]

13. Not every experiment is specifically meant for consumer applications from day one. (nt)

[DireStrike]

17. well sure, but that doesn't make it less fun to think about

But I don't really grasp ultra-new stuff like this very well. A few examples can help a lot.

[TheMadMonk]

14. Definitely. I suspect Xenon was chosen because it is a noble gas.

Thus various complicating (electro)chemical effects would not be present in the experiment.

As for applications: Fluid mechanical couplings, brakes, clutches would be a good start.