Useful Fools

This post is pure nerd stuff. See this note for examples of radar range folding in NWS radar - as illustrated by today’s shuttle disaster.

In light of today’s shuttle tragedy, there is at least one piece of good news. Unlike when the Challenger went down, this time the military is not deprived of its heavy launch capability.

After the Challenger disaster, the US military had no way to launch reconnaisance and communications satellites for almost two years!

This was a result of typical government bureaucratic maneuvering. In order to justify the huge cost of the shuttle, NASA had to persuade congress that it would also serve as adequate launch capability for all US space needs, including military and intelligence. Thus all agencies, including DOD, were forced to use the shuttle for their launches - an obviously silly decision in any case, made moreso by the tragedies.

Thank goodness we are no longer in that boat, with Iraq and Korea crises looming large.

PS… see the previous article in this blog for radar imagery of the shuttle disaster.

I was awakened this morning by a call telling me of the tragic destruciton of the Shuttle Columbia.

As a weather hobbyist, I found out that the NWS doppler radar had captured images of the debris track.

The following is an image from the Shreveport, LA radar 30 minutes after the incident. It clearly shows a radar return along the track of the debris. At the time of this writing (over two hours later), some debris (or resulting cloud) is still visible on this radar.

Click above for larger image.

Note: this is a public domain image from UCAR.

Click for the radar image loop from the actual time of the disaster. (Thanks to Mike Oronain for slowing down the loop from when I first posted it).