The mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 16 January 2003. An in-flight break up during reentry into the atmosphere on 1 February killed all seven crew members and disintegrated Columbia. The BRIC-14 and BRIC60 samples survived the catastrophe and were found intact in the east Texas debris field within a 12 mile radius in east Texas.
About STS-107 in brief
STS-107 was the disastrous 113th flight of the Space Shuttle program. The mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 16 January 2003. An in-flight break up during reentry into the atmosphere on 1 February killed all seven crew members and disintegrated Columbia. The cause of the failure was determined to have been caused by a piece of foam that broke off during launch and damaged the thermal protection system on the orbiter’s left wing. During re-entry the damaged wing slowly overheated and came apart, eventually leading to loss of control and disintegration of the vehicle. NASA estimated that 30% of the total science data was saved and collected through telemetry back to ground stations. About 5-6 Columbia payloads encompassing many experiments were successfully recovered in the debris field.
The BRIC-14 and BRIC60 samples survived the catastrophe and were found intact in the east Texas debris field within a 12 mile radius in east Texas. The moss and ring experiments’ original primary mission was not nominal due to the lack of having the original samples immediately after landing, but they helped form new theories about microorganisms surviving a long trip in space while traveling on meteorites or asteroids. NASA recovered a commercial payload, Commercial Instrumentation Technology Associates Biomedical Experiments-2. This experiment studied treatments for cancer, and the micro-encapsulation experiment part of the payload was completely recovered, increasing from 0% data to 90% data after recovering the samples fully intact for this experiment.
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This page is based on the article STS-107 published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
