Friday, Feb. 21, 2003 | 11:30 a.m.
The key to the space shuttle Columbia disaster may lie in the high desert 170 miles north of Las Vegas, authorities said today.
An intensive search of a 15-square-mile area near Panaca and Caliente from U.S. 93 east to the Utah state line began this morning. And there is a good chance that it will result in the discovery of some of the first pieces that fell prior to the complete disintegration of the shuttle Feb. 1 over Texas, Maj. Charles McCarty of the Nevada wing of the Civil Air Patrol said.
"The probability is high," McCarty said as the search began. "(Federal authorities) would not have asked for use of the resources unless they were confident of finding something that would help the investigation. We are confident something will turn up."
NASA officials on Thursday asked the Civil Air Patrol and the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department to conduct the Nevada search.
Investigators at first had focused on areas of Texas and Louisiana. But reports of possible shuttle debris in California and Arizona made them take a closer look at the other states Columbia crossed as it tried to make its way east to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The best clues about what happened to the shuttle are expected to come from the first pieces that came off, investigators have said.
McCarty said the national headquarters of the Civil Air Patrol was contacted by federal officials to begin the first official search in Nevada after videos and radar records were examined. The search area was determined based on the " blip" that appeared on the radar screens as the shuttle moved eastward, out of Nevada's skies, McCarty said.
Investigators "are confident of one (air traffic control) radar hit in the region," he said.
Earthquake sensors near Mina, Nev., also recorded unusual seismic waves as the shuttle passed over Nevada. Scientists from Southern Methodist University in Dallas who studied the recordings of the sensors said the ones on Feb. 1 were different from the usual sonic booms recorded for prior shuttles.
"Anything going that speed has got to have a (seismic) signature," said Darrel Pepper, dean of the Howard Hughes Engineering College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Retired federal seismologist Jim O'Donnell cautioned, however, that the mark recorded by the sensors placed around the state to monitor underground nuclear weapons experiments at the Nevada Test Site could have come from an electromagnetic pulse caused when the shuttle hit the atmosphere.
As many as 20 volunteers of the Civil Air Patrol, which is an auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, were to participate in the Nevada search through the daylight hours today as well as Saturday and Sunday. They will search both from the air and on the ground.
"What we will do is form a straight line and walk side by side looking for anything -- tiles, metal plates -- any type of information that will help," CAP Maj. David Jadwin, the ground team leader. "When we spot something we will stop and mark it to document it."
Among the search teams will be local Civil Air Patrol cadets who took a day off from school to participate.
"This will be something I can talk to my kids and grandkids about someday, that I helped look for the space shuttle," said Kenneth Ramirez,15, a Clark High School student.
Brett Donaldson, a "very excited" 16-year-old cadet who attends Mojave High School, said he was "really looking forward to this opportunity."
Glen Church, a retiree who is a senior patrol member, drove to the site with his horse trailer and was to join the search on horseback. Volunteers in four-wheel vehicles will also take part, along with deputies from the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office.
The Utah wing of the Civil Air Patrol will be searching an adjacent area from the Nevada state line to St. George.
The search for what could be tiny pieces of evidence is a new challenge for the Civil Air Patrol which is more commonly called in to hunt for large pieces of downed aircraft, McCarty said. Some pieces of the Columbia reportedly found elsewhere have been as small as a nickel.
One of the search teams will fly a Cessna 182 over the desert and coordinate with ground crews via radio. The crews will be looking for reflective objects that "just don't belong," McCarty said.
McCarty urged people to stay away from the search area.
Veteran aerospace expert and Las Vegas resident Fred Peters said he, like many other Southern Nevadans, had been puzzled for weeks by the failure to search this region.
"It's about time," said Peters, who worked for 30 years as an aerospace engineer and then a manager on every U.S. spacecraft from the Apollo to the space lab.
"I still think the piece that will answer the puzzle is in the Nevada desert," he said.
The first indications that pieces of the shuttle may have fallen in Nevada came from videotapes of the shuttle's re-entry on Feb. 1. They showed a sizeable chunk of flame trailing Columbia as it soared across Nevada.
What searchers should look for is a chunk of the shuttle's wing, Peters said. It could be covered in white tiles or it could be gray or black, he said.
It's the first time the Civil Air Patrol of Clark County's ground crew has been on a search, but they've had extensive training and have been pointed to a fairly specific area, McCarty said.
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