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Shuttle probe focuses on left wing

Mac Powell examines a piece of debris believed to be from the shuttle Columbia, behind his home near Nacogdoches, Texas, on Sunday. PHOTO: AP/THE DAILY SENTINEL, ANDREW D. BROSIG

As Americans mourned the seven astronauts killed when space shuttle Columbia broke up in the skies over Texas, the search to find out what destroyed NASA's oldest shuttle continued across the thick forests where some of the fiery debris crashed to earth.

For a third day, hundreds of police and soldiers were expected to fan out across east Texas and Louisiana in a search for debris and the remains of the astronauts.

Body parts, fragments and pieces of the shuttle were strewn across an area 160km long and 16km wide, most of it in the thick Texas forests known as the Piney Woods.

In the rugged rural areas, searchers used horses and four-wheel drive vehicles to scour the woods. More than 500 pieces of the shuttle had been recovered in Nacogdoches County, Texas.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists kept poring over reams of data for clues, focusing initially on a sharp heat spike along Columbia's left side and an unusually sharp corrective maneuver recorded just before the vehicle disintegrated.

A third front in the investigation was to open yesterday as an independent inquiry board appointed by NASA prepared to meet for the first time.

Shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore told a news conference on Sunday that it was much too early to speculate on what caused the disaster.

It occurred almost 17 years to the day after the shuttle Challenger exploded during liftoff.

The latest analysis of data beamed down from the Columbia -- which first flew 22 years ago -- showed that the temperature on part of the left fuselage spiked 32?C in five minutes as the spacecraft was reentering the atmosphere.

Four minutes later, "we had an increase in drag on the left side of the vehicle," Dittemore said. "The flight control system was countering that drag by trying to command the vehicle to roll to the right-hand side. ... Soon after, we had loss of signal."

Dittemore said it was unusual for the shuttle's automatic pilot system to correct drag, and the flight control surfaces moved to a degree that "is outside our family of experience."

There was no "smoking gun" to focus on, but Dittemore added: "We are gaining some confidence that it was a thermal problem, rather than ... a structural indicator."

A shuttle experiences 1,650?C temperatures when it re-enters the earth's atmosphere, but is protected by tiles that shield it from heat.

Dittemore said the shuttle's left wing was banged 80 seconds after launch by insulation that fell off the fuel tanks, but that engineers believed it caused no serious damage to Columbia's heat shield.

He said NASA received a flood of calls from the public -- 600 on Saturday alone -- offering witness accounts and amateur video of the shuttle breaking up. It was just 16 minutes from landing in Florida.

The space agency has promised a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week probe that will study everything from photos taken by spy satellites to every piece of debris recovered from the end of the 16-day scientific mission.

The debris will be sent to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana, where an independent board appointed by NASA to investigate the disaster was to meet for the first time yesterday.

The inquiry is to be led by Retired Navy Admiral Harold Gehman, who was the co-chairman of an independent commission that investigated the attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen. It will run parallel to NASA's internal review.

NASA issued a statement on Sunday saying that remains were found, adding that it could not confirm that remains of all seven astronauts had been recovered. An early report that remains of all of them were recovered proved inaccurate.

At the entrance of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, dozens of signs, flowers and balloons were placed in tribute to the fallen astronauts. Many in the tight-knit Texas community mourned at church services, while others came to the space center to pay their respects.

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