Investigators Focus On Chunk Of Wing

Investigators were close to determining whether a 2-foot section of Columbia's wing — the most significant piece of debris recovered so far — came from the space shuttle's troubled left side where temperatures surged in its final moments, NASA officials said.

The chunk includes the carbon-covered edge designed to protect Columbia's insulating tiles during re-entry and could provide hard evidence of what went wrong, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Saturday. He said investigators should know "in relatively short order" which side it came from.

In the shuttle's final eight minutes the morning of Feb. 1, temperatures surged in the left landing gear compartment, and the brake lines began overheating one by one. Sensors began showing overheating across other areas of the left wing and adjoining fuselage before Mission Control lost all contact.

O'Keefe spoke following a memorial service at Louisiana's Barksdale Air Force Base, where pieces of the shuttle are being stored. Searchers have recovered remains of all seven astronauts and more than 12,000 pieces of debris that rained down across two states.

Every possible scenario is still being considered, from the impact of a large chunk of hard insulating foam that hit the shuttle seconds after liftoff Jan. 16, to a strike from a piece of space junk, to a lightning-like electrical phenomenon.

Late Saturday, NASA said the U.S. Strategic Command apparently tracked something flying near Columbia after it had reached orbit. Space agency spokeswoman Eileen Hawley said it was possible the object came from Columbia, but stressed "this is very raw data" that had just been turned over to investigators and that it was too early to speculate.

Imagery experts, meanwhile, are poring over a high-resolution photo taken by an Air Force telescope a minute or two before Columbia broke apart. Some have suggested the leading edge of the left wing looks as if it could be damaged, and the photo shows a gray streak that could be a fiery plume trailing the wing.

NASA continues to gather evidence through an extensive debris search, centered primarily in Texas and Louisiana.

Meanwhile, about 1,000 people gathered Saturday in a church across the street from the debris search command center in Lufkin to remember the astronauts as a fun-loving but heroic group.

NASA astronaut Jeff Ashby, who recalled visiting the crew's lively table at the NASA Christmas party, said the crew was a generous, caring bunch with a great sense of humor. "They actually baked cakes for their training instructors on their birthdays," he said.

Gov. Rick Perry told the group at the First Baptist church that the astronauts "remind us that the future belongs to the brave and the bold."

In Hemphill, searchers also paused to observe the exact moment the shuttle broke up a week before. "There was total silence in the room, about a minute, and then we went on with life," said Marq Webb, U.S. Forest Service spokesman.

Meanwhile, a CNN-Time poll out this weekend found that 71 percent said the shuttle program is worth the risk to human life, and a CBS News poll found that 75 percent said the shuttle should be continued.

A majority of people also say the shuttle program contributes a lot to the nation's sense of pride and patriotism, and about a third think it contributes a lot to science, the CBS poll found.

Most people said they were upset by the Columbia disaster, as they were at the time of the Challenger explosion 17 years ago. But the number who said they were "deeply upset" dropped from 63 percent in 1986 to 46 percent now, according to the CNN-Time poll.

They seemed relatively satisfied with the level now being spent by the government and were evenly divided on whether the government should spend the billions of dollars needed to build a replacement shuttle, the polls suggested.

The CBS poll of 831 adults was taken Wednesday and Thursday. The CNN-Time poll of 1,003 adults was taken Thursday. The polls had error margins of plus or minus 3 percentage points.