Debris might be from shuttle

Monday, Feb. 24, 2003 | 10:51 a.m.

CALIENTE -- The search for possible debris from the shuttle Columbia in a rugged area about 170 miles northeast of Las Vegas stalled today after a winter storm moved into southeastern Nevada.

"We're on a weather hold," Doris North of the Civil Air Patrol of Clark County said this morning.

The National Weather Service expected up to 10 inches of snow to fall in the search area through Tuesday.

Lincoln County Sheriff Dahl Bradfield said he didn't expect the melting snow to have any major effect on the search when it resumes in a few days.

"The only way it would have any impact on the search would be if there was any flooding," Bradfield said. "We don't expect that to happen, and we don't think this snow will be a real problem."

More than 100 volunteers searching the sagebrush desert northeast of Panaca Saturday and Sunday found fragments that scientists say might belong to the doomed Columbia. Among the discoveries were slivers of foil, a gray switch and a postage stamp-sized bit of metal that might have come from the shuttle.

The finds tantalized space experts, but pending analysis, none of the evidence has been linked to Columbia, which disintegrated Feb. 1 over Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

Casey Wood of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor, said he planned to ship an estimated 25 to 30 pieces of debris by FedEx today to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for analysis.

Those pieces from the Nevada desert might help solve the mystery of the crash -- if investigators confirm they came from the shuttle.

Aviation archaeologist Richard Russel, a Southern California resident, roamed the range Sunday with a global positioning satellite device in hand and said: "If these (pieces of debris) are confirmed (as) coming from the shuttle, Nevada will have more than a footnote in this portion of space history. Nevada will have a whole chapter."

"We're certainly expecting to find something bigger in the debris path," Wood said. "We're sort of treating it as a crime scene, gathering evidence."

Foil fragments found by searchers could have come from a passing airplane or they could be an alloy used in the shuttle, officials said.

If those bits of foil and silvery strands are linked to Columbia, they will end up at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration investigators are trying to reconstruct the shattered shuttle there in an effort to determine the cause of the disaster.

"Look, I'm no shuttle expert, but I can recognize pieces that come off of aircraft, and these pieces warrant further analysis," Wood said Sunday.

Some foil strips that were found appeared to be singed. They were bagged, dated and handed to Wood. Other bits of debris picked up by searchers could have come from a weather balloon or from an experimental aircraft, Wood said.

"You find a lot of strange aircraft flying around here," he said.

Throughout the weekend, Wood sent digital photographs of the material found to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Civil Air Patrol ground and air crews, Lincoln County Sheriff's Search and Rescue teams and other volunteers from California and Nevada contributed to the search, combing desert brush and mountains dotted with pinyon pine and juniper trees in the high desert.

More than 100 bits of material had been collected by late Sunday, Lincoln County Search and Rescue Commander Ken Dawson said.

Investigators are particularly interested in any pieces of the shuttle found in Nevada, because they would be the westernmost bits of debris found so far. They could offer important clues as to why the disaster occurred, officials said.

NASA experts had reviewed videotapes of Columbia's flight recorded by two Nevada residents, one by a Sparks resident and the other by Paul Andrews of Las Vegas. What they saw matched air traffic control radar records indicating that the shuttle streaked above Nevada from the skies above Mina, in the central part of the state, to Lincoln County in the southeast section.

Scientists also reviewed sound waves that the University of Nevada, Reno's Seismology Laboratory recorded as the shuttle passed over the state, about five minutes before it crashed in Texas, showing roughly the same path.

Before the search, Greg Frazier, aviation archaeologist from Southern California, gave the Civil Air Patrol cadets a lesson in what to look for, displaying shuttle tiles, burned and intact, and providing photographs of Columbia as it streaked into the atmosphere from Hawaii through Nevada.

Civil Air Patrol Commander Rick De Castro of Santa Clarita, Calif., a trainer for the National Association for Search and Rescue, has examined plane crash sites and searched for missing persons.

Three of his team members, Richard Lovick, Shane Terrestra and Brian Colenga, found shiny foil objects with carbon deposits on them. The objects appeared to have been scorched.

"The only thing I can think of that would be burned up like this is a shuttle," De Castro said.

Aerospace veteran Fred Peters said finding a piece of the shuttle's wing would be crucial for investigators.

"If they can find a good-sized portion of that, it could prove enormously helpful," Peters said.