A surprising discovery recently uncovered by a documentary TV crew is connected to one of the worst disasters in American space history, which had a particularly strong impact on Texas. NASA has confirmed that an artifact discovered by divers off the east coast of the state of Florida is actually Challenger wreckage.
Documentary divers were looking for airplane wreckage from World War 2 when they came across a sizable object that was plainly man-made on the floor of the sea and appeared to be part;y covered with sand. After considering the item’s vicinity to the coast of Florida space, its contemporary construction, and the existence of square tiles of 8 inches, the crew contacted NASA.
NASA officials confirmed the object is really a piece of the Challenger after seeing the TV crew’s film. The Challenger exploded during launch on the 28th of January of 1986, killing all seven crew members, all of whom had trained in Houston. A History Channel documentary describing the finding of the Challenger artifact will air.
Honor
While this is going on, NASA says it is thinking about what else it can do with the item to properly honor the memory of Challenger’s lost astronauts and their families. This is a strategy that NASA usually employs in such situations. There are quite a number of occasions in which we have seen this happen.
The spacecraft spent the night on 39B (launch pad) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center which is situated in Florida as part of a celebration of the agency’s 25th shuttle flight. As a result of a rapid coastal cold front that delivered freezing temperatures, the shuttle developed ice. Despite reservations voiced by a few shuttle program staff, launch managers gave the mission the all-clear for launch at exactly 11:38 in the morning on January 28.
The memory of the blast still lingers in the mind of people who witnessed the explosion first-hand. NASA found that the explosion was caused by the unexpectedly low temperatures impairing the functionality of O-ring seals found in the solid joint segments of the rocket booster.
Significance
The incident involving the Challenger and the 7 astronauts aboard the Columbia, which broke down on reentry in 2003 in the month of February around the western parts of the US, had a significant impact on NASA’s safety culture. The organization thereafter built a new assessment of risk process, an office that handles all matters to do with the safety and assurance of mission, and a setting where anybody could voice their concerns about safety.
A program called the Apollo Challenger Columbia focusing on the lessons learned was established by NASA to disseminate these lessons both within the organization and to other government, private, public, and worldwide audiences.
Although 37 years have passed since the Challenger disaster, NASA declared in a statement that the tragedy will always be etched in the memory of the American people. The primary principle of safety should always be the top priority at NASA, especially since their missions to explore more of the cosmos have increased.
