First Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster Media Map—Base Search Vector With Rainbow Debris Buffer

On February 1, 2003, at approximately 8 a.m. CT the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost upon reentry over east Texas. Within a few minutes of the spacecraft breaking up and explosions over Nacogdoches, GIS was put to work aiding local law enforcement in protecting public safety. As debris was still raining across east Texas, geospatial scientists from the Forest Resources Institute and the Humanities Urban and Environmental Sciences (HUES) GIS Laboratories at Stephen F. Austin State University begin to map located debris with a horizontal accuracy of less than one meter using survey grade GPS units.

Within a few hours of the destruction of Columbia, GIS accurately modeled the shuttle’s debris location and distribution by calculating a base search vector (BSV) from a least-squares linear regression using data that included Nacogdoches County 911 call sheets and “best-fit” reported debris locations. Validated by GPS data sets processed overnight by the HUES laboratory and the Center for Space Research, University of Texas, Austin, the BSV was extended across 11 counties of east Texas. Combined with detailed spatial analysis from the night of February 1 and the early hours of February 2, BSV was released to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and local law enforcement officials during the early afternoon of February 2 in the form of a current Landsat 7 ETM+ satellite image map showing BSV surrounded by a 20-kilometer rainbow buffer of decreasing debris intensity. This was the first media map produced for the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy. It was produced in mass and distributed to the media on the afternoon of February 2.

BSV was instrumental in guiding hundreds of search and recovery (SAR) teams during the critical early days of the recovery effort and resulted in the recovery of Columbia’s crew by February 14. Guided by BSV, the monumental SAR efforts lasted for three and one-half months involving more than 180 federal, state, and local agencies with more than 30,000 searchers covering the largest ground search area in the world—almost 700,000 acres—and recovering an unprecedented 39 percent of the shuttle’s remains.

Stephen F. Austin State University geospatial analysts continued to perform rigorous analysis on the effects of subsequent debris data sets on the spatial trend of the original BSV. The analysis resulted in a drift of BSV with a trend to the south and a subtle clockwise rotation as sample size increases. In all cases, the maximum deviation from the original BSV is less than 2.3 kilometers.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s final report recognizes the contributions of Stephen F. Austin State University and the critical role that GIS played in the early days of the recovery efforts. Although reconstructed many times, the BSV developed from vastly limited data during the first crucial days of the Columbia tragedy proved to be an accurate guide that allowed the historic SAR effort to recover enough of the shuttle’s remains for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to identify the probable cause of the mission’s reentry failure.