Space Shuttle hard disk survived crash
By Matthew Sparkes
Posted on 6 May 2008 at 09:06
Important experimental data has been recovered from a hard drive found amid the wreckage of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
The recently discovered 400MB Seagate drive survived the explosion that destroyed the Shuttle on re-entry, and was sent to data recovery firm, Ontrack.
The firm managed to recover results of an experiment into the way xenon gas flows under micro-gravity.
Those results have now been published in the Physical Review E journal, some five years after they were thought lost. Recent cutbacks in NASA spending on basic research mean that experiments such as this are unlikely to be repeated.
"It was a load off my shoulders to finally get it published," says Robert Berg, lead investigator on the experiment, speaking to Scientific American. "We assumed that it fell out of the cage and burned up and that was it."
Although much of the data was downloaded while the experiment was in orbit, the full data set had never been seen until the discovery of the drive. The disk was a standard commercial model, but had been reinforced and fitted to the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle.
From around the web
advertisement
- Chrome's shine getting lost in translation
- BytePac: the cardboard hard disk enclosure
- How tech loosens our grip on reality
- Hokum watch: Safer Internet Day
- Why I'm deleting Adobe from my PC
- Prepare to be patronised: it's Safer Internet Day
- Dear Sony, Samsung and every other tech company in the world: stop trying to be Apple
- Will Apple's Final Cut Pro X update placate the pros?
- Smartr Contacts for iPhone review
- Switching to Office 365's Outlook Web App
- Why virtualisation hasn't slowed the growth of data
- How to make Google AdWords work for your business
- The curse of sloppily written software
- Paying for your crimes with Bitcoin
- Behind the scenes: tech support for Formula 1
- The security risk of fat fingers
- Why Windows Phone 7 isn't quite ready for business
- When will Microsoft stop fiddling with Windows 8?
- Flash down the pan?
- Metro Style apps vs desktop applications
advertisement
