Last January the 11th, the Columbia departed in the direction of the International Space Station with seven crew members on board, Commander Rick D. Husband, pilot William C. McCool, Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson and Mission Specialists Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel B. Clarl and Israel´s first astronaut, Ilan Ramón, who held a post equivalent to that of Pedro Duque in mission STS-95 in 1998 aboard the Discovery, another member of the fleet.
On February 1, at 2:15 in the afternoon (Spanish time), the Columbia decelerated to leave its orbit and come back to Earth. 28 minutes later, when the mission had been 15 days, 22 hours and 17 minutes in the space, the Columbia descended at an altitude of 68 kilometres at almost 21 times the speed of sound and was about to touch down at landing streep 33 at Kennedy Space Center, at Cape Cañaveral.
Contact with earth´s atmosphere at such speed is –apart from launch- the most dangerous operation of a space shuttle. To minimize impact, the Columbia, which orbits face down, turns to enter atmosphere with at a critic angle of 40º, in such a way that presents its belly covered with tiles resistant to the heat generated by friction. In spite of everything, the heat generated when entering the atmosphere creates a layer of ionized particles around the shuttle radios´ signals can not go through and during 16 long minutes the shuttle loses communication with Houston. It happened this way over a hundred times and everything went as planned. However, some minutes after starting the manoeuvre of rotating the shuttle, a sensor failure in the hydraulic systems of the vehicle´s left wing was detected from Earth, a failure which was verified by the onboard flight computer system. Three minutes later, without communication with Houston, the Columbia exploded at an altitude of 63 kilometers at a speed of twenty thousand kilometers/hour (about 18 times the speed of sound) 16 minutes from Cape Cañaveral. The causes of this tragedy, in which the whole crew died, have not been defined yet, but they are probably related to the damage the left wing of the shuttle sustained during launch.
Apart from its crucial mission as a bus to the International Space Station, the Columbia had a payload with more than one hundred experiments to carry out. Cardiovascular experiments, studies about plants and fishes´ gravitational sensitiveness, osteoporosis and stress response; atmospheric and astronomical experiments and on combustion physics, reology, drug capsule manufacture and a lot more besides including several educative projects presented by high schools students. Thay also had two experiments of the UGR about protein crystallization with the Advanced Protein Crystallisation Facility, the same facility of the European Space Agency that we had redesigned for Pedro Duque´s flight. We had prepared these experiments conscientiously and patiently because, although they had been planed for the year 2000, the successive technical problems of the Columbia postponed the launch until last January. Such uncertainty is inseparable from space experiments. For those who watch it from Earth, such tension is nothing compared to that of the astronauts. Commander Husband and his crew knew that there is not a space mission free of danger. But they wanted to contribute to know more about the Universe and to learn how to move outside the earth in the front row, an inevitable destiny for mankind. A todos ellos, Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel B. Clarl and Ilan Ramón, Laboratory of Crystallographic Studies (LEC) of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) thanks you for your dedication; we will never forget you.
Reference: Juan Manuel García Ruiz
Research Professor of the CSIC
Director of the LEC
E-mail: jmgruiz@goliat.ugr.esa/a>
