A Last Look at Columbia

[major_clanger]

NASA has released photographs of Columbia taken by the US Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site telescope some four days before the shuttle was lost. (This is the facility purplecthulhu was talking about in our Picocon panel.) Unfortunately for the accident investigation these pictures don't show the area of suspected damage on the underside of the left wing, and may well not be sharp enough to have shown anything significant anyway. Nonetheless, the detail is incredible.

This is how I hope we remember Columbia, not just as burning trails etched on the sky, or as charred fragments in Texas fields.

MC