> If the wing was truly damaged and it was damaged to the extent apparently > indicated by this image then I am inclined to believe that this damage would > have been easily seen by the crew. Since they already do "space walks" maybe a "walk" around the plane before coming home ? > This particular image may be an indication of failure-in-progress or nothing > more than an imaging anomaly ... like a reflection or glint of sunlight, the > peculiar orientation of the orbiter relative to the camera and sun, etc. What I (we?) don't know is whether this was just one isolated image or one of many from a series selected for display merely because it seemed to show something the others didn't. Did other photos in the series show nothing, similar artefacts elsewhere or was this a consistent pattern? Hindsight is inevitable in this case: the shuttle exploded. That though makes it very hard to examine evidence objectively. When I looked at your photo (before visiting http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/02/07/sprj.colu.wrap/index.html to read the details) I thought we were being asked to look at the "vapour trail" behind the left wing. Maybe that's because to me it made more sense to be looking for evidence like that than trying to find a few missing tiles at that range. The "jagged inserts" are massive: if they were real I would have guessed they would have impacted on the handling .... > I think that the underlying question is whether a ground based telescope would > have been able to detect a few tiles missing from the heat shield such that a > catastrophic failure would have ocurred. It is this that I gravely doubt. Same here, but if there was some sort of reaction going on (burning, turbulance etc at the site of MUCH smaller damage) the disturbance could leed to an artifact ... > In this particular image the resolution is very low. I wondr if a film based > system would have worked better. Hahahah ...don't start that war Andy Bob
