Hi Marcia,

Good eye. I'm in the process of downloading high-resolution versions of the images of Columbia at launch, and preprocessing images that show the ET and the left wing. I don't expect we'll discover anything new--anything we can spot in a photo somebody standing there would have noticed, not to mention all the inspectors whose job it is to examine every square inch of the Shuttle under a magnifier. I'll put together a gallery of close-ups for everybody who's interested. That'll take at least overnight, since right now the KSC site is slow.

In a related vein, one of the videos I have is the 45 megabyte launch replay, which shows the complete launch as seen from a dozen different cameras. The official coverage is spliced together out of this raw footage. A couple of the cameras were those super-high-resolution tracking cameras that track the Shuttle in close-up many miles high, and I'll see if I can isolate the footage of the insulation coming off.

Another recent acquisition is the video from NASA-TV prior to landing. It begins about 10 minutes before breakup. I haven't had the nerve to watch the whole thing yet...

--Robert