HARDENED DRIVE: Engineers from NASA's Johnson Space Center recovered this hard drive, a cold-plate mounted Seagate containing roughly 400 megabytes of data from the CVX-2 experiment, taken from the wreckage of Space Shuttle Columbia in February 2003. They sent this image to CVX-2 engineers in October, alerting them that the hard drive had withstood the shuttle's destruction.
Image: NASA
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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.
Although the CVX-2 results may not change anyone's life, Robert "Bobby" Berg, the lead investigator for CVX-2 and a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., says the publication caps a 20-year research project that has occupied his thoughts daily since 2003. "It was a load off my shoulders to finally get it published," says the 52-year-old researcher.
The CVX-2 experiment was designed to measure xenon's viscosity close to the critical point, or the combination of temperature and pressure at which liquid and vapor are essentially indistinguishable. Near that point, a gas should "twinkle," Berg says, as droplets quickly condense and evaporate within the thick fog. According to the theory behind shear thinning, as an object swishes through these droplets more vigorously, it should begin slicing through individual droplets and hence feel less resistance.
To test for the effect, the CVX team sent up 0.37 fluid ounces (11 milliliters) of xenon sealed in a vessel that contained a thumbnail-size nickel mesh capable of vibrating at a range of amplitudes [see image]. The group downloaded about 85 percent of the data from the 370-hour experiment while Columbia was in orbit—enough to see that it was working as expected—but the test depended on the full data, which was locked in a nearly 400-megabyte commercial hard drive ensconced in a metal "card cage" and housed with other electronics in a larger vessel in the shuttle's cargo bay.
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 [see image]. 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.
He notes that the experiment could have only worked in microgravity, to prevent the xenon from settling under its feather-light weight. With NASA's priorities shifting away from basic research, he says, "this is the sort of experiment that won't be duplicated for a long time, if ever."
Editor's Note: The original URL for this story was posted in error and has been changed.
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16 Comments
Add CommentNot sure where to report this, but the link to this story that comes up in the iGoogle gadget and in the SciAm search (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=shuttle-fall-down-and-go) is a bad link. :( Glad I found this story though! Good to see this team's work get a chance, and I think it's great that, after such a huge accident, the data could still be recovered.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot a major issue, but 4 oz is approximately 118 ml, not 11 ml as originally published.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'd rather know *how* the data was recovered.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no way any data was recovered from the drive in the photos.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDon Wells
VP Technologies
First Advantage Data Recovery Services.
yo mpiton, it says it's .37oz, NOT 4oz. .37 oz = 10.9244ml
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@dwells
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTrying to pull authority by putting a real or fake title behind your real or fake name doesn't help you promote your point at all. On the Internet, we're all trolls until proven otherwise. Some valid arguments as to why this disk is/was unrecoverable could be able to convince some. But this? No.
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Edited by Soulkeeper at 05/07/2008 6:34 AM
Hi, the 4oz. was indeed a typo, which I've corrected.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo DWells: Here's the article detailing Ontrack's recovery procedure. The only physical components of the drive used were its platters:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9083718
This is definitely feasible - and good work by your competitors. Would it have killed you to follow this up before making that statement?
It is a very imaginative experiment and we learn a lot i performing this type of experiments. This type of studies should be continued in few more flights.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, the hardware was inspected and photos forwarded to the CVX team by the FREESTAR debris team of Goddard Space Flight Center, not JSC as noted in the article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMon cher monsieur Scientific American.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you for a second chance to improve on my primary remark.
Thar it goes. I was saying: The 'point of contact' between human awareness and 'outside' experiences in nature must still exist even in 'microgravity'. I was wondering whether or not this effect of ours on experiments would remains affixed to our 'observations' whatever visual form they take, like a fossil would remain there on the ground. If such be the case, I see that dimension and purpose in Science can no longer be so definite. What is yur strategy, sir, where true probability is concerned. Thanks anyway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe findings from this hard drive are incredible and should help improve designs immensely to take into account the viscosity change in Xenon. What impressive <a href="http://salvagedata.com">data recovery</a> to be able to extract information from a device that was literally part of an explosion high in the atmosphere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recently lost everything on my computer. I'm not sure what happened. I didn't do anything different that would have caused this to happen. I need someone that does <a href="http://www.laptoprepairdata.com">data recovery brooklyn</a> area. I need some help!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, for the record, the hardware was identified by Goddard Space Flight Center engineers at KSC's Columbia debris receiving hangar, in collaboration with Glenn Research Center.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks so much for the post. I love that the magic of <a href="http://WWW.KENEDACOM.COM">data recovery</a> was able to help us to know what went wrong. Hopefully, we will be able to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
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