NASA investigators have recovered a small, battered box that likely contains experiments that a group of scientists, including Oklahoma researcher Dr. Allen Edmundson, sent into space aboard the shuttle Columbia.
Edmundson learned of the discovery on Thursday, when he viewed a photo of the container that The New York Times had posted on its website. “When I saw that picture, I just about blew the lid off the building,” said Edmundson, who heads the crystallography research program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. “I couldn’t believe that our little box could have survived a fall from 200,000 feet.”
The container, a small, aluminum ox, was found near Nacogdoches, Tex. Edmundson is almost certain that the box is one of three placed aboard the Columbia by Instrumentation Technology Associates, a private consortium that sends scientific experiments into space.
“Ours was the only hardware with that kind of configuration that was aboard the Columbia,” said Edmundson, who had also sent experiments on four prior shuttle missions.
On the Columbia, Edmundson had sent up a pair of cancer experiments. The experiments involved taking proteins from cancer cells in their natural, liquid form and transforming them into solid crystals. Edmundson hoped that these experiments would ultimately lead to the creation of a drug to treat multiple myeloma, a fatal bone cancer with no known cure.
Since Saturday, Edmundson and other members of the consortium had been combing through photos in hopes of discovering some trace of their work in the debris. Even though that prayer has now been answered, Edmundson believes that the experiments most likely did not survive the massive fall to earth.
“There’s always a chance, but it would have to be a miracle of miracles,” Edmundson said.
Although neither Edmundson nor any of his fellow scientists have yet had a chance to examine the container, he is hopeful that NASA will soon allow them access to their work. “That box has given us our first glimmer of hope since the tragedy,” said Edmundson. “If the box remained intact, maybe some of the crystals did, too,”
