Saturday, May 10, 2008

Columbia disk drive recovered

The recovered disk drive from Columbia had been used to capture data
from an experiment on Xenon gas flows.

Kansas City Star - Jon Edwards often manages what appears impossible. He has recovered precious data from computers wrecked in floods and fires.

Now Edwards may have set a new standard: He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003.

“When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn’t even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted,” said Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc.

Like other Columbia debris, the mangled disk drive turned up in Texas.