No search for debris in Nevada

Ed Koch and Mary Manning

Thursday, Feb. 6, 2003 | 9:58 a.m.

Experts are not yet ruling out the possibility that shuttle debris fell in Southern Nevada, but so far no official search is being conducted in the area.

"If they started losing pieces (in California), it's possible bits landed in Nevada," said Darrell Pepper, dean of UNLV's Howard Hughes College of Engineering and a former engineer for the U.S. aerospace plane program. "Those pieces probably burned up re-entering the atmosphere. It would have to be a pretty big piece to recover anything."

The debris would also have needed to fall into the concentrated population area of Southern Nevada to be found. If it fell in the expanse of desert, mountains and Lake Mead that surrounds it, you'd have a better chance of hitting Megabucks than locating a small piece of the Columbia in this region, said University of Nevada, Las Vegas physics professor Donna Weistrop, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist.

"There are a lot of empty places in Nevada," Weistrop said.

So far, none of the objects reported in California and Arizona have been confirmed as coming from the Columbia, but NASA investigators are examining hundreds of objects in the two states. NASA officials say that more than 15,000 pieces of the shuttle have been recovered -- some as small as nickels.

Weistrop, a UNLV physics professor since 1990, noted that many pieces of the Columbia have been found in Texas and Arkansas because they landed in people's backyards or in large enough chunks in areas where recovery teams could spot them.

Michael Kostelnik, NASA's Associate Administrator for International Space Station and Space Shuttle, said Wednesday that recovery teams have been dispatched to California and Arizona. Debris recovered from areas farthest to the west is critical because it could provide information about the early stages of Columbia's breakup.

But NASA has not opted to use the military or its resources in any search for debris in Nevada.

Nellis Air Force Base spokeswoman Lt. Lori Dockendorf said airmen have not been deployed locally or to other states to assist in the search for shuttle debris. NASA has made no request for help from the base, she said.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, manager of the Nevada Test Site, was placed on standby Saturday immediately after the shuttle explosion, but was never sent to do remote searching, spokesman Kevin Rohrer said.

The National Nuclear Security Administration has remote sensing equipment that could identify and locate debris by relying on heat sources, he said.

"We have not been asked to do any searches in the state or at the Nevada Test Site," Rohrer said.