STS-107 was the 113th flight of the Space Shuttle program, and the 28th and final flight of Space Shuttle Columbia. The mission ended on February 1, 2003, with the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, in which all seven crew members were killed upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere; the shuttle was destroyed along with most of its scientific payloads. The flight launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on January 16, 2003. It spent 15 days, 22 hours, 20 minutes, 32 seconds in orbit. The crew conducted a multitude of international scientific experiments. The disaster occurred during reentry while the orbiter was over Texas. Immediately after the disaster, NASA convened the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to determine the cause of the disintegration. The source 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 (reinforced carbon-carbon panels and thermal protection tiles) on the leading edge of 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. The cockpit window frame is now exhibited in a memorial inside the Space Shuttle Atlantis Pavilion at the Kennedy Space Center. The damage to the thermal protection system on the wing was similar to that of Atlantis which had also sustained damage in 1988 during STS-27, the second mission after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. However, the damage on STS-27 occurred at a spot that had more robust metal (a thin steel plate near the landing gear), and that mission survived the re-entry.
Crew
Crew seat assignments
Mission highlights
STS-107 carried the SPACEHAB Research Double Module (RDM) on its inaugural flight, the Freestar experiment (also known as FREESTAR) (mounted on a Hitchhiker Program rack), and the Extended Duration Orbiter pallet. SPACEHAB was first flown on STS-57. The primary mission focus was multidisciplinary microgravity research. On the day of the experiment, a video taken to study atmospheric dust may have detected a new atmospheric phenomenon, dubbed a "TIGER" (Transient Ionospheric Glow Emission in Red). On board Columbia was a copy of a drawing by Petr Ginz, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Vedem, who depicted what he imagined the Earth looked like from the Moon when he was a 14-year-old prisoner in the Terezín concentration camp. The copy was in the possession of Ilan Ramon and was lost in the disintegration. Ramon also traveled with a dollar bill received from the Lubavitcher Rebbe. An Australian experiment, created by students from Glen Waverley Secondary College, was designed to test the reaction of zero gravity on the web formation of the Australian garden orb weaver spider.
Major experiments
Examples of some of the experiments and investigations on the mission. In SPACEHAB RDM:
9 commercial payloads with 21 investigations; 4 payloads for the European Space Agency with 14 investigations; 1 payload for ISS Risk Mitigation; 18 payloads NASA's Office of Biological and Physical Research (OBPR) with 23 investigations. In the payload bay attached to RDM:
Combined Two-Phase Loop Experiment (COM2PLEX); Miniature Satellite Threat Reporting System (MSTRS); Star Navigation (STARNAV). FREESTAR
Critical Viscosity of Xenon-2 (CVX-2); Space Experiment Module (SEM-14); Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment (MEIDEX) Low Power Transceiver (LPT) and Communications and Navigation Demonstration On Shuttle (CANDOS); Solar Constant Experiment-3 (SOLCON-3); Shuttle Ozone Limb Sounding Experiment (SOLSE-2); Additional payloads
Shuttle Ionospheric Modification with Pulsed Local Exhaust Experiment (SIMPLEX); Ram Burn Observation (RAMBO).
Results and data gained Three experiments performed during the mission examined combustion, soot production, and fire quenching processes in microgravity, which provided new insights into combustion and fire suppression not able to be observed in Earth conditions. Other activities included a granular compression experiment which aided understanding of construction techniques, two separate experiments exploring the biological applications of cell cultures that could be used to combat prostate cancer or increase crop yield, as well as several other experiments that evaluated the commercial usefulness of plant products grown in space.
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