West Coast footage may hold clues to tragedy

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday February 06, 2003 20:46 by Sabin Russell srussell at sfchronicle dot com

Physicists classify Ray's brain as the ignorasphere

There are all kinds of electrical activity in the upper atmosphere (for Ray: at-MUH-sphere). In particular there is a layer known as the ionosphere (i-ON-uh-sphere). It is called the ionosphere for a reason because it is the home of electrically charged particles. Sprites and elves flit about the ionosphere waiting for space shuttles and such. Columbia even photographed some during its mission. Then again Ray wouldn't know an elf from a sprite if one came up and zapped him up the ass.

West Coast footage may hold clues to tragedy
Sabin Russell, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, February 6, 2003

NASA photo analysts are poring over videos and photographs taken from California of the doomed space shuttle Columbia, hoping to stitch together a sequence of visual clues to explain the increasingly puzzling loss of the orbiter and its seven-member crew.

Of particular interest is a startling image taken by an amateur astronomer in San Francisco, which appears to show a purplish bolt of lightning striking Columbia at it streaked across the predawn skies.

During a Houston news conference, Shuttle Program Manager Ron Dittemore said he hadn't yet seen the West Coast videos and photographs being gathered by NASA imagery and photo experts.

The pictures, shot from different angles and in different locales, coupled with eyewitness accounts from shuttle-watchers, may create a mosaic of evidence about the shuttle's crucial pass over California, when instruments first showed signs of trouble.

"Once you collect it all, you can look at it in time sequence," Dittemore said.

Top NASA officials had appealed for photographs or video evidence from amateur sky-watchers on the West Coast after receiving a detailed eyewitness report from a radio-astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. Anthony Beasley said he saw a flarelike object drop away from the shuttle as it streaked over the Owens Valley, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada.

Included in the new material gathered by NASA is a video taken in Sparks, Nev.

Dittemore did not address directly the provocative San Francisco image, which has not been shown to the public by the photographer but was examined by a Chronicle reporter before it was shipped to Houston.

EX-ASTRONAUT DELIVERS PHOTOS

NASA dispatched former astronaut Tammy Jernigan, who has flown five times on the shuttle, to pick up the photos and the camera itself. She delivered them to a NASA jet at Moffett Field, where they were to be flown to Texas on Wednesday.

Jernigan said she did not know what to make of the image but agreed it needed to be analyzed.

"We sure will be very interested in taking a very hard look at this," she said while examining the picture in the photographer's San Francisco home.

The images could turn out to be the result of a subtle jiggle of the camera or might depict some rare electrical phenomenon in the zone known as the ionosphere, more than 40 miles above Earth.

Photo analysts should be able to match the location of the strange lightning-like image with a precise point in space and time during the orbiter's descent. That's because the photograph also depicts a crisp field of stars in the background, which provide astronomical reference points.

The amateur astronomer, who does not want his name released, said he believes he snapped the images at 5:53 a.m. Saturday. That is the just about the time when a bank of shuttle sensors detected a modest heat buildup in a wheel well, followed by a cascade of failing sensors, increasing heat and ultimate loss of flying ability.

Seven minutes later, the orbiter broke up 203,000 feet above Texas and rained debris down a 160-mile swath into Louisiana.

With five flights to her name, including three on Columbia, Jernigan is well acquainted with the eerie visual effects of re-entry, when the shuttle slams into the thin upper atmosphere and the heat at the craft's leading edges builds to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

"It's an extraordinary light show," she said. "There are flashes of pinks and yellows and whites."

AREA PRODUCES ODD EFFECTS

Should the photograph prove significant, it would open the inquiry into a strange world of high-altitude electro-physics. The field studies a place in the skies once described by physicists as the "ignorasphere," because so little is know about it. It is populated by ghostly electromagnetic effects that the same wags named "blue jets, elves and sprites."

These mysterious electrical events -- once part of airline pilot lore -- are now extensively documented. In fact, one of the experiments conducted during Columbia's ill-fated mission by Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon involved observations of the sprite phenomenon.

Sprites are powerful electrical discharges that occasionally leap from thunderclouds to the borders of the ionosphere. But there were no thunderstorms beneath Columbia as it re-entered the atmosphere over California.

"Even if there was a storm in the area, it is not likely to be the cause of such a discharge," said Mark Stanley, an expert in high-atmospheric physics at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Nevertheless, he said the upper atmosphere is capable of building up enormous electric charges. "Streamers" of static electricity can conduct electrical charges at twice the speed of lightning based on the ground.

"I'm highly skeptical they could have had anything to do with Columbia's demise," he said. "But somebody needs to see how they interact with spacecraft. In my opinion, it needs to be studied."

E-mail Sabin Russell at srussell@sfchronicle.com