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I got a question about the Columbia accident. While I know this may seem really offensive so I'm really sorry about the tragedy but something's just confusing me. I heard on the news that NASA identified all the remains from the crew. How is this possible? And exactly what was left from re-entry from the outer atmisphere?

Pretty much only torsos where located. While the shuttle broke up, it didn't totally disintegrate and the pieces found likely had some protection behind intact sections of hull or heat shielding. The shuttle is quite strongly built, it was determined that four members of the Challenger's crew may have survived until hitting the water, despite having the force of a small nuclear bomb exploding feet from them.

The heat energy the shuttle builds coming back down should be about equal to the energy of the rockets used to get it into space.

I think they were IDed via DNA analysis. Probably patches as well...

Sea Skimmer wrote:Pretty much only torsos where located. <snip>

They also found at least one head and leg (I remember hearing about those), along with a heart. I've tried not to read any more about that, as it's rather morbid and gruesome even for me.

It's possible because after being ejected from the debris, the rather low-density bodies decelerated very rapidly, which prevented them from burning up completely.

It sounds like something that should be at rotten.com. Hopefully pictures of that won't turn up at rotten cause that would be really fucked up.