Data recovered from Seagate drive in Columbia shuttle disaster

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall [joehall () gmail com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 9:18 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Data recovered from Seagate drive in Columbia shuttle disaster

(their server is taking quite a hit from the attention to this
article... I've included a coralized link at the bottom which should
be used in place of the link at top.  However, right now, even the
coralized link is borked. -jlh)

----

http://blocksandfiles.com/article/5056

Data recovered from Seagate drive in Columbia shuttle disaster:
Most amazing disk data recovery ever

posted on 06 May 2008 20:05

It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003:
the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in
fragments.

Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments
has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took
place on the doomed Shuttle mission.

Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected.
Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of
shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and
then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.

The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it
off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who
sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the
data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his
team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging
significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in
microgravity.

The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of
data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few
years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the
experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review
E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes
from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred
vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when
similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden
change in viscosity is called shear thinning.

It was a highly complex experiment needing prologed and detailed
analysis of the data on the hard drive to discover the shear thinning
effect. But it, like the drive, was eventually found. So ends a
twenty-year research project and in doing so helps bring to a finish
the dreadful story of the Columbia Space Shuttle mission.

[Chris Mellor, editor.]

(might want to try the coralized (CDN'd) link if you get 404s or 500s
due to load: http://blocksandfiles.com.nyud.net/article/5056 )

--
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
UC Berkeley School of Information
http://josephhall.org/

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