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On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle
Columbia disintegrated over Texas during
re-entry over the Earth’s atmosphere.
Although the disaster happened years ago,
Jon Edwards, a data-recovery specialist from
Ontrack, managed to recover information from
a melted 400 MB hard-disk drive manufactured
by Seagate that survived the explosion of
the shuttle and fell from the sky along with
hundreds of other debris during the Columbia
Disaster.
According to MSNBC, Jon Edwards has a
record of recovering data from computers
that has been damaged from floods, fires,
and even computers dumped in lakes. During
the STS-107 mission, the Space Shuttle
Columbia crew was experimenting the
properties of liquid xenon and stored
valuable data into the disc drive. The
series of tests and experiments of liquid
xenon revealed the way xenon gas flows
without the use of Earth’s gravity.
The 370 hours of testing cost the
government millions of dollars and the
valuable information could have been lost
along with the seven crew members during the
Columbia Disaster. Although lots of the
information was radioed back to Earth from
the shuttle, the remainder of the
information stayed hidden for five years
until Jon Edwards managed to discover the
rest of the information.
The remainder of the information from the
disc drive allowed researchers to publish
the experiment about liquid xenon without
gravity in the April issue of a science
journal called Physical Review E.
Physical Review E: not only did it
present information about liquid xenon, it
retold the salvage efforts of Kroll Ontrack.
They said that six months after the
disaster, a NASA contractor sent the disc
drive to Kroll Ontrack because of their
specialization in data recovery.
However, the particular job was assigned
to Jon Edwards, an engineer at Ontrack,
because of his record of data recovery
against innumerable odds. As I stated
before, he has been able to recover data
from computers that has been affected by
floods, fires, and computers dumped in
lakes.
Because of his unique reputation, Jon
Edwards was given the challenge which was to
extract data from a disc drive that survived
an explosion of a space shuttle and fell
from the sky that landed in Texas. Edwards
states, ‘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.
It looked pretty bad at first glance, but
we always give it a shot.’ (MSNBC) During
the beginning of the data recovery
operation, Edwards was thinking negatively
and believed that the results would not be
positive. I feel that he had good reasons to
be very negative. For example, the drive’s
metal and plastic was melted but the seal on
the sides that kept dust and dirt out was
also melted.
This made the drive exposed to particles
that could affect tiny materials in the
drive that holds data and depending on the
magnetic charge of the particles, it can
destroy the tiny material’s ability to
contain data. Since the drive was only half
full, the magnetic particles only affected
the part that did not contain data and
fortunately for Edwards, the data in the
drive remained in the drive.
He later used a chemical solution to
clean the platters of the drive and restored
the data into another disc drive. This
process took two days and he managed to
extract 99% of the data into the disc drive.
After Edwards was rewarded by Kroll Ontrack,
he was given two more disc drives from the
Columbia Disaster but unfortunately, the
disc drives were severely blasted by the
entry from the atmosphere and the metals no
longer had a magnetic charge thus, the disc
drive contained no data.
However, the discovery of lost data from
the Columbia Disaster saved the government
millions of dollars from preventing another
shuttle launch in order to receive
information that had been lost from the
Columbia Disaster and it also completed the
crew of STS-107’s purpose of research to
gain and spread knowledge to people. |
