Aerospace Technology

Although this may not be a particular subject that relates to aerospace technology, this  news about a discovery from disaster that happened five years ago somehow made me want to tell this to everyone. Many people still remember the Columbia Disaster and some forget after new discoveries are made and breaking news is heard. However, a data recovery from the disaster completed the crew’s main purpose which was to use their experiments to discover new knowledge. I wanted to write this post to give credit to a man that completed the crew of STS-107’s exploration purpose, Jon Edwards. 

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas during re-entry over the Earth’s atmosphere. The disaster was caused because of a piece of foam insulation that broke off the shuttle’s external tank during launch and allowed hot gases to enter the internal wing structure which eventually destroyed the shuttle during re-entry. Although the disaster happened about five years ago, Jon Edwards, a data-recovery specialist from Kroll Ontrack, managed to recover information from a melted 400 MB hard-disk drive manufactured by Seagate that survived the explosion of the shuttle and fell from the sky along with hundreds of other debris during the Columbia Disaster. According to MSNBC, Jon Edwards has a record of recovering data from computers that has been damaged from floods, fires, and even computers dumped in lakes. During the STS-107 mission, the Space Shuttle Columbia crew was experimenting the properties of liquid xenon and stored valuable data into the disc drive. The series of tests and experiments of liquid xenon revealed the way xenon gas flows without the use of Earth’s gravity. The 370 hours of testing cost the government millions of dollars and the valuable information could have been lost along with the seven crew members during the Columbia Disaster. Although lots of the information was radioed back to Earth from the shuttle, the remainder of the information stayed hidden for five years until Jon Edwards managed to discover the rest of the information. The remainder of the information from the disc drive allowed researchers to publish the experiment about liquid xenon without gravity in the April issue of a science journal called Physical Review E. 

Physical Review E not only did it contain information about liquid xenon, it retold the salvage efforts of Kroll Ontrack. They said that six months after the disaster, a NASA contractor sent the disc drive to Kroll Ontrack because of their specialization in data recovery. However, the particular job was assigned to Jon Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack, because of his record of data recovery against innumerable odds. As I stated before, he has been able to recover data from computers that has been affected by floods, fires, and computers dumped in lakes. Because of his unique reputation, Jon Edwards was given the challenge which was to extract data from a disc drive that survived an explosion of a space shuttle and fell from the sky that landed in Texas. Edwards states, ‘When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn’t even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted. It looked pretty bad at first glance, but we always give it a shot.’ (MSNBC) During the beginning of the data recovery operation, Edwards was thinking negatively and believed that the results would not be positive. I feel that he had good reasons to be very negative. For example, the drive’s metal and plastic was melted but the seal on the sides that kept dust and dirt out was also melted. This made the drive exposed to particles that could affect tiny materials in the drive that holds data and depending on the magnetic charge of the particles, it can destroy the tiny material’s ability to contain data. Since the drive was only half full, the magnetic particles only affected the part that did not contain data and fortunately for Edwards, the data in the drive remained in the drive. He later used a chemical solution to clean the platters of the drive and restored the data into another disc drive. This process took two days and he managed to extract 99% of the data into the disc drive. After Edwards was rewarded by Kroll Ontrack, he was given two more disc drives from the Columbia Disaster but unfortunately, the disc drives were severely blasted by the entry from the atmosphere and the metals no longer had a magnetic charge thus, the disc drive contained no data. However, the discovery of lost data from the Columbia Disaster saved the government millions of dollars from preventing another shuttle launch in order to receive information that had been lost from the Columbia Disaster and it also completed the crew of STS-107’s purpose of research to gain and spread knowledge to people.Information from www.wikipedia.org, www.news.softpedia.com, www.msnbc.msn.com, and www.cnn.com