Eyewitness to a tragedy

At approximately 5:45 Saturday morning, Caltech astronomer Tony Beasley was outside his home in Bishop, northern California. He, his wife, Anne, and his mother-in-law, none of whom had ever seen a spacecraft landing, were watching for the space shuttle Columbia’s reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The sky was clear and still dark.

Beasley, project manager for the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO), was unaware that what he was about to see would gain major significance as the world learned of the tragic loss of the seven crew members and the shuttle. A few hours later, he summarized his observations in an e-mail message.

“We began watching about five minutes early to make sure we saw it,” Beasley wrote. “The landing track was to the north of Bishop, several tens of miles . . . The orbiter was sighted immediately when it cleared the Sierra Nevada mountains to the west of Bishop . . . sometime shortly after 05:50 PST . . .
“Initial view was a single very bright object, tracking west to east rapidly. There was a pinkish hue to the trail it was leaving, and the trail was long-lived—by the time the orbiter had passed from view to the east the trail visibly spanned the entire path west to east. It faded to a typical looking contrail (i.e., cloudlike) within a minute or two.

“The orbiter appeared as a single bright object. I could resolve the actual orbiter, but the hot coma around it appeared to be at least slightly resolved (by coma I mean the visible region of heated gas at the head of the trail). During the track from west to east, on at least three separate occasions, there was a brief brightening (pulsing) of the coma (lasting 0.2–0.5 seconds or so . . . ).

“I have tried to recall the events from memory about two hours later.

“First event: Seen shortly after orbiter came into view ( . . . maybe 10–15 seconds after first sighting). Brief pulse [fraction of a second]. Possibly saw secondary material in trail immediately after.

“At [the] time I thought it must have lost a tile (I was aware the shuttles routinely did when they landed, no idea what that would look like . . . ).

“Second event: About 10–20 seconds later. By this time orbiter was roughly north of viewing location . . . . Coma pulsed [again a fraction of a second], brighter than first event (although atmospheric attenuation at the lower elevation for event 1 makes direct comparison unreliable). There was clearly a new trail formed after this event, directly behind the orbiter (i.e. the second trail was parallel to and contained within the main trail). My impression was that it was more than one piece, i.e., that there was a main piece and a few smaller bits (2–3?). They fell behind quickly, taking a few seconds to fall [approximately] 1–2 degrees behind and then fade from sight, with some suggestion that they were falling just before vanishing.

“Again—seemed consistent with the tile hypothesis, so I didn’t focus on it.

“Third event: Brightest of the events, about 15 seconds after #2. Substantially brighter than others . . . Very clear view of object detaching, forming separate trail. Looked like orbiter dropped a flare or something. Bright secondary object quickly fell out of main orbiter trail, generated its own trail for a few degrees . . . It took some time to fade from sight (5 seconds?)

“At the time I did wonder whether something that major would be a tile. My wife asked me what the things coming off were. I replied I thought they were tiles.

“I have some recollection that there may have been other dimmer events between the first and second events listed above.

“Total time to pass from rise . . . to out of sight ( . . . beyond orographic clouds over the White Mountains) was not timed, but I’d estimate it at 40 seconds minimum, probably over a minute all together. We waited 3–5 minutes longer to hear the sonic boom, and did not hear it unambiguously. Based on what I’m hearing from the news services, roughly 2 minutes later the orbiter broke up over Texas.”

Beasley did not learn of the space shuttle’s loss until he drove to OVRO, about 10 miles south, to speak with two photographers. He ended his message, “On behalf of the staff of the Caltech Owens Valley Observatory I’d like to offer our condolences to the family and friends of the shuttle astronauts and to NASA at this terrible tragedy.”

When asked that day about Beasley’s sighting, shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said it might just be the normal buildup of hot plasma during a space shuttle reentry. On Sunday, however, Dittemore said that after closer examination of Mission Control data, NASA now believes that Beasley did in fact see pieces of the spacecraft falling off and that his observations will be important in the ongoing investigation.
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