Although it's been several years since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it looks like some of the data gathered during the orbiter's final mission will be put to good use. A hard drive salvaged from the wreckage contains the results of an experiment to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity, and the results were published in the April edition of a journal called Physical Review E. The 400MB Seagate drive was originally thought to be destroyed, but workers and engineers reconstructing the orbiter from the remaining debris found it during the process and sent it off for recovery, where 99 percent of the data was extracted. It then took several years for lead researcher Robert Berg and his team to analyze the findings, but they're happy with the results -- we only wish they hadn't come at so dear a price.
[Thanks, Laura]
posted May 6th 2008 2:51AM
How could it have taken 7 years, when it crashed in 2003?
It says SEVERAL NOT SEVEN
also results WILL be published in April .... and we are in May
http://pre.aps.org/
I checked the website and didnt find the info
what you are all missing here is that the technology has to stand up to extreme amounts of radiation.
they also (at least up to the last few years) have been running the equivalent of 200mhz processors that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars because of the time and testing put into them.
and to arcticfox..what the heck are you talking about? you have some personal issues against SSDs?
Isn't NASA grateful that they didn't install IBM "Deathstar" hard drive in their Thinkpad(s)?
hahahaha.
Kudos to Seagate
Billion dollar space shuttle with 400MB hard drive?
Can has 64GB SSD?
Thats the first thing that came to mind...400MB on such a advanced piece of technology...
Dont forget these things have to withstand massive vibrations on lift off then the vacuum of space.
I dont know about you but i dont know what kind of effect those things have on SSD drives, maybe whatever format the HDD uses to record data can only store 400mb onto its medium.
How many SSD drives do you know that can withstand take off, space travel then unfortunately a burnup in atmosphere then a 50-60 mile drop to the earth?
Seriously use your brain.
400MB hard drive, pre-2003: $200
Engineers' salaries to design enclosures that are protected from extreme tempertures, booster shock and vibe, vibro-acoustics, emi, solar radiation, first mode response resonance, etc... : $$$$$$$$
Ha, I read right over that and automatically assumed MB was a typo. But yeah, what ArcticFox said seems logical.
you're also forgetting the space shuttle has been in service since the early 80s. Im not saying they dont update their equipment but they dont do it on a regular basis, esp the hardware so its no surprise that it is a really small hdd
In agreement with ArcticFox, 400MB should be enough to store important scientific information. A smaller capacity drive does make more sense when you consider that the higher the drives density the harder it is to recover it's data and the more prone it is to data loss. It's much easier to recover data from a 400MB drive than a 400GB drive with only 350MB of data on it. This is the very reason why enterprise class SAS/SCSI/FC-AL drives have such smaller capacities for data reliability and recovery reasons.
SSD are highly prone to data loss in the presence of solar flares (solar radiation or EMF) where Hard Drives in the presence of solar radiation will fry their controller circuits, but will retain their data on the HARD DISC. SSDs would not likely survive the high temperatures of space re-entry, but hard drives have been known to still have recoverable data on them even after being engulfed in flames for several hours.
NASA knows what they are doing. My best advice is not to be 'too critical' of their technical decisions.
If you think the hard drive size is pathetic, it's because they are
working off of technology that is several years old. This is because
they must test EVERYTHING for even the slightest chance that it would
be affected by radiation.
The space station that everyone dreams of that looks like some sort
of futuristic living habitat is not real. Most of the space station
is held together with duct tape! This makes sense because they can't
use welding torches because it burns with the oxygen in the air, and
duct tape is strong and flexible (and isn't affected by radiation).
you can weld in space (and underwater also)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_manufacturing
Mother of Per... Duct take CAN do Everything!
Has anyone at Scientific American ever taken a grade school SCIENCE CLASS?
Check out photo 3.
A micrometer is NOT a "thousandth of a meter", it's a "millionth of a meter".
I know it's Scientific "American", and Americans don't have the ability to understand complex measurement schemes like METRIC, but seriously.... How can you trust the scientific integrity of a publication that can't get their basic unit measurements right?
hopefully they meant thousandth of a millimeter
Yep, Amerikkkan$ sure are dumb! Why can't those idiots stop using arbitrary measurements and realize they weigh 3 stone and 14 grammetons!? No sir, I will not give you a "gallon" of soda, whatever that is. You will accept this 147.345 deciounce flagon and like it!
Scientific American is not a peer-reviewed scholarly journal and thus should not be judged as one. Finding a mistake in a periodical destined to be sold in a newsstand is not difficult and should not be something that causes you glee as you utter slurs about the culture that shares it's name. Big deal, they made a mistake in a magazine. If you want everyone to know that you can read a micrometer then publish a magazine listing of all your talents.
I don't know what's more ironic: The fact that you call into question the technological competence of Americans in the comments for a NASA article, or that you used the internet to do it.
Get a life.
*pushes up glasses, posts comment*
*readjusts seating position, reads comment*
*sighs that no one appreciates the hard work that went in to recovering scientific data that was evidently important enough to send to space in the first place*
*comments meaninglessly*
*needlessly points out typo in original comment, casts aspersions on the integrity of Zorque's mother, and inserts meaningless fanboyish zing in favor of some company having nothing to do with the matter being discussed*
*ponders commenting, then decides against*
Wait, oh! Crap....
* sits back in shock that no one has compared HDD size to their latest iProduct! Cant cope, has heart attack..........*
*posts about how subject matter sucks compared to iphone and makes vista joke*
Is our children learning?
Isn't they?! If how not must know why.
I like to grammar, frequently.
Calm down people it a Bush quote, Google it.
I still think that 400mb is a strange size.
Do you think that they were still using the HDDs that were installed on the shuttle in the 1980s?
Probably. When I took an Astronomy course in 2004, my professor (who had been laid off from NASA) said that at the time, the shuttles were still launched with computers running on punch cards.
Even if that's an exaggeration, it still expresses that the technology is old stuff.
Columbia was outfitted with a glass cockpit and all new electronics in 1999. It's a myth that these things were flying around with 1980's technology.
I'm also curious as to why everybody seems to think this was the only hard drive on board. This was just one of at least several.
And yes, 400MB in 1999 was quite large. And given that scientific data is generally stored as numbers in a database, it would be more than enough to store probably all the data ever collected over the life of the entire shuttle program. It was probably also being used for other things, but you get the point. It was plenty big enough.
In 1999 I had 12GB, and that wasn't large it was typical of a home PC at the time. I don't know why people think 400mb was large.
I agree with Jeff about this being one of many HD's on the shuttle. Also usually the experiments/data logging has nothing to do with the shuttles computer system. More than likely data recording hardware is built into the experiment modules that are installed in the shuttle. They also take up notebook computers that I would assume have bigger hard drives on them, although I would imagine those arent as critical to experiments and survival but don't quote me on that :)
400mb isn't THAT much data. Data at 1 KHz with uncompressed 16-bit samples from 10 sources continuously for a 6 hour experiment is 412mb.
I'd be willing to bet this was in a drive mirroring RAID array and that they had a set of drives for each experiment.
Nasa generally uses HDD technology with the largest safe disk area. Blocks? I don't know, I just know that they consider sending a 400MB hard disk much safer than sending a 40GB hard disk.
Also it often takes years to get equipment certified.
I guess this says alot about Seagate quality?
at least they didn't use deathstar
*waits for another meaningless reply just like this onet*
stupid reply system >_
stupid comment system >:(
Most of the experiment's data was sent to earth before the crash, this is just the last of the data.
Yet another reason why I only purchase Seagate drives.
I wonder if they used that legendary five-year warranty :)
Now there's a great promotional tool..."Choose Seagate hard drives. They will last even if you don't!"...
That's a bit morbid....
It is morbid, but I bet they could still do up a commercial in a patriotic way saluting the astronauts.
Seagate drives survive incredible explosions but my seagate crashed cause i left it on over night. meh. 99% data recovery thats something to talk about. Especially considering the explosion and the crash to the ground at Mach 11.
I don't think the terminal velocity of a hard drive would be Mach 11 by the time it hit the ground, but I understand what you're saying.
I'm sure they didn't just plug it into the ol' IDE cables and copied 99% of the data. Most likely they used an electron microscope or some other fancy toy to read the hard drive, so it didn't actually have to be in operational condition.
It probably wasn't that hard to recover, considering the relatively good condition of the casing. They probably just transplanted the platters to a working drive of the same model.
The info on the hard drive cant be so much, that you would need a big hard drive. I'm sure the data is only text,graphs, and maybe some audio(speech).
You are all assuming that it is a 400MB drive, when in the article it says 400MB worth of data. It does not say the size of the drive.
Wrong. It says "The 400MB Seagate drive...".
When are we going to see this up on Drive Savers website and will they bring it to Macworld next year for their booth. You know it had to be them.
@Mike: From the article:
"...but the test depended on the full data, which was locked in a nearly 400-megabyte commercial hard drive ensconced in a metal "card cage" and housed with other electronics in a larger vessel in the shuttle's cargo bay."
'twasn't a specially designed hard drive, and may not even have been specifically certified. But it was 400MB and it was, apparently, large enough to store the data in question.
And the article says it was Ontrack Data Recovery, not Drive Savers.
If the capacity of the hard drive worked for the experiment, then great. I'll bet it was a bit lighter than a 400 GB hard drive, which is probably 100,000 taxpayer dollars saved in rocket fuel. And if it is already proven to work then upgrading the drive isn't as important as spending money on the billion other things that need to be taken care of before launch. I think the name of the game when it comes to the shuttles or any space technology is minimizing everything while still being able to do what you need to. That applies to weight, volume, and complexity. But maybe not price. We need the X prize to get price down.
Based on my experience with Seagate (I work for them), there's no way you'll see any cold-hearted promotion based on this.
They also found a set of Zip disks in a fireproof box in perfect condition but no data could be recovered due to a clicking sound when inserted into a Zip Drive.
Ah yes, the death-knell of the ZIP did sound like a "Click Of Doom"
I'm just thinking about the company that did the data-recovery work... After this, they'll be able to charge whatever they want going forward.